This is perpetuating a common myth, namely that connecting to multiple networks translates into access to more files. It's a myth that makes sense on the face of it. It breaks down on the level of the searching protocols, however, and it's a myth that programs like Shareaza and Morpheus use as a marketing gimmick to get users to try their programs.
Why is it a myth? It's a myth because all p2p networks have physical limits that prevent searches from reaching beyond certain numbers of computers without overloading the bandwidth capacity of every node on the network. "Gnutella2 (aka Mike's Protocol)", Gnutella, eDonkey, FastTrack, etc all face these physical limits. All of these networks are highly advanced at this point. The eDonkey and Gnutella search architectures in particular are extremely efficient. The MP architecture seems pretty good, but it's not specified very well and will require someone plugging through the source code to really have a look at how good it is. FastTrack is probably trailing all of the other networks at this point in terms of search efficiency. That said, none of these network are able to search beyond a million or so nodes for a given (rare) file simply because there's only so much bandwidth to go around, and we've already extracted most of the big efficiencies to be tweaked out of these architectures.
The only way connecting to more networks can result in more files is if a client acts as a leech, if it connects to a network and sucks resources from it and contributes no resources back. This is precisely what Shareaza does with Gnutella and eDonkey. It connects as "leaves" to both networks to ensure that it does not have to contribute any resources while leeching off the other users of those networks to get files. Yick! Same thing the Morpheus folks do.
Don't get me wrong, Mike is clearly a talented programmer and Shareaza has lots of great features, and Mike's generally a nice guy. These kinds of behaviors are just a little obnoxious though, and doesn't tend to make Shareaza any friends. I don't work for LimeWire any more, by the way. These are my own, completely independent views.
