I was reading the Gnutella protocols and found it very hard to understand whether all nodes reply with a pong to my ping and if so does this mean I know all their IP (if TTL is about 7 that could be several hundreds or thousands) and if so do
I connect to all of them, or do I choose a few, and how do I choose them?

at the begining i thought everyone was answering everyone, which would create a clique very soon, but it doesn't seem to work that way in real life,
any ideas?