Note that BitTorrent is not by itself a P2P network with search capability. You can't search in BitTorrent, you can just download from swarmed BitTorrent locations provided that you have a
BitTorrent URL and that the initial BitTorrent source indicated in that URL is permanently accessible (on a true web server).
BitTorrent is then a very useful system to help a website reduce its output bandwidth, by letting its downloaders becoming assisting mirrors for the web content.
BitTorrent will be fantastic for contents that you can search in a central server that hosts tens of thousands of files, that are heavily replicated (I see a good application of BitTorrent for the distribution of free software, on websites like freshmeat.org or OSDN/SourceForge, if they can't upgrade to support more transfers at efficient transfer rates: it may become critical in some near future for these central servers to work with more and more broadband users that want to download at megabits/s speed).
BitTorrent would be also fantastic for distributing streaming contents via HTTP (for example free radios on the web), without paying lots of money to very expensive CDNs (Content Delivery Networks).
In the future, if there are good central servers with lots of contents where we could search for BitTorrent contents, it could be a good addition to LimeWire to add a component connecting to these servers (if they accept the workload for these searches). But for now, it's premature (unless we just integrate in LimeWire the BitTorrent client where you import an BitTorrent URL found on the web.
The immediate need is not BitTorrent but a wider support of Magnets on web sites (Magnets are concurrent to BitTorrent, but can perform more things, as a Magnet can also be made to search in Gnutella).
Last edited by verdyp; May 22nd, 2004 at 05:24 PM.
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