Well recently you may have seen in the news that the Limewire pear to pear operations has been shut down and if you visit the Limewire website you will see a notice stating why.
LimeWire Legal Notice
So LimeWire p2p got shutdown because they allowed people to download illegal content. Not all content on the network was illegal but most people abused it. Some people will make a version of Linux or do podcasts and use the Network to send them out without having to host it using bandwidth transfer and disk space on their own web server/hosting plan. This is the same with torrents. So the Torrent and LimeWire technology can be used for good but it sadly abused. LimeWire is a client that connects to the Gnutella network. There are still clients out there that can connect to the Gnutella network not made by LimeWire. The way P2p file sending works is someone will add a file to the network and with their client open, the file is accessible. Each client acts as a node on the network. Clients can search Gnutella index or the torrent trackers index. A client will then start downloading from all the nodes with that file on the network. So basically Gnutella or Torrent Tracker stores information that contains where the file is located. The file itself isn’t on the trackers server. LimeWire use the Gnutella network by default or you could give it a torrent file from some other tracker/network. This is my understanding on this technology and please correct me if I am wrong.
So lets put this in context. Your web browser of choice is a client. Google is the network Index. Some other server hosts the file.
A lot of web browsers have Google as the default Search Engine(LimeWire used Gnutella as the default network to search files). You can go to any other site or search engine with a web address(Kinda like how the torrent file would let you link to another tracker). Google indexes webpages and more. Then Google points to the download page(file location).
So basically Google Crawls a File on the Internet network, Links to it for download. Lets you search for it. Yes, a Webpage is a download. This page is a download. So if you use the right search operators you can get a page with the links to a download or maybe even the .mp3 itself. So I think Google is doing just what Gnutella did. Gnutella linked to file locations, aren’t they doing the same at Google? A popular YouTuber jimmyrcom shows how to use Google as a “peer to peer network”. I don’t endorse this but just adding this to this article as evidence.
Once again, this is my understanding of P2p technology. So my opinion is search engines are just as bad as Gnutella. Do you think web Search Engines or Google are just as bad? Also Bing can search, can you find Mp3’s with it search operators, if it has any? Maybe it faces the same problem. I don’t endorse piracy and i hate it. I am a software developer. So i wonder if the major music organizations could go after Google to make them stop searching Mp3’s or worse shutdown the whole Google that we love? I am not even sure if its legal to link to a copyrighted file. Then again everything has a copyright by default. I am not a lawyer or anything like that. The only reason i used Google as an example in this article is because that’s the only search Engine i know it is possible on but maybe other search Engines have this issue as i haven’t tried. I also wanted to say that i am not trying to pick on Google, I think they have great products like Docs, Gmail, apps , YouTube and more, but bringing it to your attention like a Journalist should do.
