Greetings.

Is there any way to restrict search matches to whole words? For example, there is a band called EAV. Typing EAV into the Limewire search box yields thousands of hits, almost none of which are from said band, because the letters e-a-v happen to be extremely common (in English, anyway).

If this is not possible in Limewire, does any other Gnutella client have this feature? Or is such a thing simply not possible due to the inner workings of the Gnutella protocol?

I'm not sure about this, but what about searching for "EAV -"? Would that not require the results to have the space after "EAV", thus making it unlikely to see other stuff because words don't end in eav? (can't think of any right now anyway). Or perhaps any letter after the space, but then the results you want will show up as being 50% instead of 100% (big deal). I imagine that different clients handle this in different ways.

This won't work -- LimeWire doesn't treat spaces as significant, even if they are enclosed in quotation marks. Again, I wonder if this is a limitation of the Gnutella protocol. I remember back in the Napster days all searches were for exact words only, so finding songs from bands like EAV was no problem.

Yep, you're correct. I just tried it myself. I know that some clients may not provide the results you want when queried, however, it is certainly possible to have the client you are using ignore results that don't exactly match what you have typed. it would be quite easy. I am working on my own version of LimeWire, so I'll probably put that in!

There's got to be a solution for this. You can narrow it down a little by searching for mp3-- when I look for stuff by the group L7 I have to search for
l7 mp3
because there's a three letter minimum.

I wonder if there could be a standard for groups with names that are tough to search for.

There's got to be some way to tag this stuff...maybe add a suffix to the end of the filenames or agree on a common name, like calling the band X "Exene"...

Does this happen already? Have the fans of any difficult bands come up with agreed search terms?