What does this mean??? (ã‚so@ in searches)

[keith5]

Hello -- When observing searches recently I noticed that about 10% of search terms recently have one of the following appended to them:

ã‚so@
ã‚so@
ã‚np@

What do these mean?? Specific examples:

St****ay to H****nã‚so@
Sh******meã‚so@
A**C Liveã‚np@

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Any ideas? Ive never seen this till recently, and now theyre coming across all the time. Thanks!!!

[wondering why]

Probably fake files...
When you run your cursor over the file name does any info come up ??
Do they have a bitrate ??
What size files are they ??

[keith5]

Thanks, but this in the Gnutella searches, not the search results. When youre an ultrapeer you can go to Monitor Tab and then click "Show incoming searches" and see what other ppl are searching for. People are searching for things and these characters are being appended to the end. It's really not random characters, its usually one of these 3 character sets thats on the end of what their searching for:

ã‚so@
ã‚so@
ã‚np@

I am doing a project for college thats due at the end of the semester and this is going to mess it all up if I cant explain what this means to my professor. Ive been watching searches for over a year now, and have never seen this. Now Im seeing it in at least 10% of gnutella searches. Help!!

[Lord of the Rings]

Are they LW clients do you know? Some other gnutella programs don't translate their messages properly over to LW; eg: whilst the searches will go thru ok, LW doesn't decode them properly. This is a guess as I am aware there are some issues between gnutella clients. Which ones? Not absolutely certain, but BearShare seems to be one. Some of the older gnutella clients also. Some characters don't translate properly either.

After 10 mins of checking, I only saw one with @ at the end but nothing like you saw. Possibility of lack of language support on your side.

In my monitor I see also japanese, chinese, korean & moslem.

[keith5]

Thanks -- You were right. There were language issues with my machine that I've since fixed.