I would also like to point out that the statistics regarding network size, number of files available, etc. are far from accurate, and I would not look to them in any way for reflecting the performance of the network.

The changes we have recently made have, in fact, increased the overall efficiency of the network tremendously. If you are looking for rare content in particular, LimeWire works far better now than it ever has in the past. We will no longer return 1000 results for a search because it is simply bad for the network to do so -- returning that many results saturates Ultrapeer bandwidth and causes messages to be dropped. From a practical perspective, such high numbers of results did not give you a better chance of getting the file you wanted.

I would suggest searching for specific things -- this should improve your experience.