search results vary depending on position
 

I've posted this message in the "general" forum already, but as gnucleus features that cool mapping feature this is perhaps the place offering more users interested in the question below.


first i want to give an example illustrating what I mean by the headline-- :

Me and a friend are both gnutella users- I live in Germany,
she's in California.

I once wanted her to listen to some German Rap, and advised her to search for a specific artist on Gnutella.
We were both connected to the network at that time, and I
could find many files matching the keyword.

My friend was unable to get any search results.

Naturally, the content on the users' machines differs from country to country.

I assume that most machines she had in her horizon at that time were set up in the anglo-american sphere and that most of the hosts she was directly connected to where in the US.

This doesn't sound logical because the hostcaches should connect people from everywhere, disregarding their geographical position.

Yet connections hosted by an ISP spatially close to your own location generally have a better quality, i.e. the US ISPs are better interconnected than they are connected to the European / Asian ISPs.

therefore, I guess that the hosts one stays connected to (the ones not timing out or disconnecting because of lacking bandwidth etc.) are either regionally close to yourself or within the same "virtual" region of well-interconnected networks.

The search queries have a limited TTL and number of hops, so the farther "away" (in the terms described above) a host is, the harder it becomes to reach that host and its content.

For example, I hardly ever get connected to Japanese hosts.
I do know that the content I'm looking for is more likely to be situated on japanese machines.
The example of my US pal not finding German rap in her "regional" gnutella subnetwork describes exactly the same situation.

did I make a mistake in that thinking model?

Is there a way to tweak clients so that they integrate themselves in a subnetwork of the user's choice?

The solution would be "regional" hostcaches that automatically connect users to corresponding clients and provide a neat horizon showing the other hosts in that particular sphere.

Are there such regional hostcaches??

I saw some txt lists once, but that seems a lil bit awkward considering the dynamics of the gnutella network.

k please tell me what you think about this and whether I made any mistakes (or came up with something you've discussed already.....if so, sorry)

noci

I don't know that it really depends on geography, but the chances are pretty good that any two randomly connected nodes might not be able to see each other. Even if you both connect to the same host cache, so many people use it that you may not be able to reach the other person (especially if you connect at different times). It's all the luck of the draw.

As the gnutella net grows, it becomes harder to see all (or even most) of the nodes on the net. The best solution is to have the person connect directly to your IP address (or you to theirs).

yes, if I know the person (i.e. my Cal. friend), I can connect to the host by manually entering the IP number.

but what happens if I don't know the IP number of any member of the "regional" subnetwork i want to connect to?

some sort of regional hostcache only providing IP numbers of a designated "origin"- be it geographical or `virtual´- would come in handy.

i.e. only being provided a list of hostnames ending with *.jp would be a great help to really connect to machines actually situated in Japan and (hopefully) hosting the desired content.
same filtering could be done with almost any gTLD.

hey perhaps that could be a feature of the clients themselves- there should be a switch that forces the programme only to connect to clients from a certain gTLD.

n

While I agree nodes do tend to pool into isolated subnets, I don't think it forms along geographic lines necessarily. Just connecting to a North American node, for example, may not give you any greater chance of reaching your friend. Still, your idea might help if you were looking for specific regional content (connecting to *.jp hosts looking for J-pop MP3's for example).

Yup, thats right.

Host caches right now are not anywhere near sophisticated enough to preference by geography.

Geography usually means little to the internet, connections are better rated by ping than by where physically the computer is located.