Is BitTorrent Search Harmful?

protee writes "p2pnet published a report arguing that the robustness of BitTorrent to free-riding might have been more related to the lack of meta-data search rather than to its tit-for-tat-like strategy. The question now is: how the release of such search engines is going to impact the BitTorrent network?"

People will start sharing...

[Anonymous Coward]

...when they can't be traced. Up the encryption and IPsec and you'll find that people will start to share.

Network?

[julesh]

The question now is: how the release of such search engines is going to impact the BitTorrent network?

The answer: not at all. There isn't a BitTorrent network, just an application that has caused many thousands of disjoint, single purpose networks to come into existance.

And that disjointness will help protect them, I feel.

Difference is the universities' attitude

[tepples]

Difference: The early Web flourished in .edu circles, where there are likely to be a lot of people dedicated to providing educational works of authorship on fat pipes. BitTorrent, on the other hand, is often blocked by .edu ISPs, and residential customers of commercial ISPs don't have nearly the fat pipes to supply everyone who wants to download a given file.

Do you think it will sanitize BT?

[bsgk]

Seeing as how the **IA and its international counterparts have been successful in shutting down the tracker sites and this will help them locate these sites, don't you think the impact will be a move to only legal files being indexed for the search. This could actually lead to a vindication of p2p as a useful piece of software and a decline in the number of sites specializing in illegal copyrighted downloads.

It could be compared to bootlegs being move from inside the music/video/etc. store to the street merchants that have to pick up and move everytime the cop walks near them.

May well be right

[m50d]

I've never seen a P2P network without leechers. Even those which include an economics system like edonkey still have their share. I don't think there's anything fundamentally different about bittorrent. Now it's pretty much an ordinary P2P net leechers will appear. The economics will help limit their impact though.

Re:Isn't the principle of Bittorrent...

[TubeSteak]

LEECHERS genius.

More leachers != merrier

More peers = merrier

I think the main problem with some bt clients is that they flood your upload bandwidth... thus killing your DL speed.

A client that intelligently detects/limits/manages ULs is probably the best thing that can happen to bittorrent

As long as uploading is a transparent process that doesn't interfere with n00bs general internet usage, they won't bother to become leechers.

Conflicting Answer

[Lord Bitman]

Bittorrent Search could be slower than normal bittorrent usage, if these techniques are used (though I personally find that my download speeds are abysmally slow until I have enough segments to upload too, this "new user window" the report talks about could be a figment of the author's imagination)
But this will not effect Bittorrent Itself. Bittorrent remains useful for legitimate downloads- of the type that people will be downloading the .torrents for from a website that's trying to provide files for people.
Bittorrent may not become more useful because of searching, but it wont become less useful.

Re:May well be right

[Uber Banker]

The concept of leeching as in traditional P2P apps and BitTorrent baffles me.

To download you have to upload. If there is a lot of upload capacity relative to download you download less (i.e. you could get 5kbps dl vs 1kbps ul when averaged out) resulting in a low share ratio - the thats because there is heads of capacity. On the otherhand if you download a little but there is high demand (or you keep your connection open) you'll end up with a share ratio >1.

This is ingrained to BitTorrent, it is impossible to have a majority of leachers: the share ratio for all users must always equal 1. That is the fundamental difference, and that is why BT sites which say "you must maintain a share ratio greater than 1" totally dont understand the fundamental mathematics.

Re:More info for the idiots.

[ScrewMaster]

Yes, but the real question is what causes that lack of "altruism" in the first place. My assumption (which could be wrong) is fear of retribution by some media conglomerate. Those with transfer caps would also be candidates for leechhood too, I suppose. However, when nearly untraceable P2P technology becomes the rule, when the Fear of God(tm) and/or somebody's lawyers is no longer a significant issue, I would expect altruism levels to shoot up. Remember the original Napster: everybody pretty much shared their entire collections. It wasn't until the RIAA started slinging lawsuits around that people even thought about anonymity (I think most people assumed they were anonymous.) Well, now they are thinking about it, but so are a whole lot of developers. From the RIAA perspective, I think this is going to backfire bigtime. I mean, they had to know this was going to happen.

Re:Blocked already

[vitalyb]

Personally I find it REALLY disturbing that we reached so quickly a censorship to SEARCH STRINGS. How will it end? :(