When you are freshly connected to GnutellaNet "poor hosts" with view friends means you won't have a lot of answers to your queries (depending of what they share).If you stay a lot of time without any change and friends go away from your view , it becomes true : friends are overestimate.But often hosts are refresh and if they don't you certainly connected to " rich hosts " with permanant connection (56K users don ' t share a lot and dont stay a lot of time usuallly) , so we can think that number of friends could be a good approximate number.But in the new ver , refresh often can't make any change , connecting again to "poor hosts" ...Friends is certainly not the best parameter to know what are best hosts .We can imagine a better parameter like files shared or bytes shared .But I think we absolutly need one to improve our search ...
When I use Gnucleus , I am exactly in this case .I connect to GnutellaNet .Wait for friends few minutes (a maximum with the magic "drop nodes with less than X friends") .Make my search .Then download. And let it do the work .I stay often connected during night to share...During the night what you say can happen:loose friends.But I have always enough to share.Believe me !