The low amount of hosts is probably due to your connection speed. You can obviously increase two things to get more hosts 1) your TTL's and 2) your number of connections. However each connection sucks up bandwidth, so on a 56K you will use it up real quick...you could also try using someone who is running a reflector check http://dss.clip2.com they have a list on people running reflectors and more importantly how to use reflectors... normally these people have faster connections and have a better horizon to look at.

As for push requests... these are a solution to firewalls... if you are behind a firewall and the other person is behind a firewall then there is no way to get the file. But if only on of you is behind a firewall sometimes it's possible. So I'm gonna step out on a ledge and say that your ISP may have some sort of firewall in place. You'll notice that some IP's in the searches come up red. Those are people behind firewalls. Just avoid d/l'ing from them and you shouldn't have problems with push requests.