Re: [GNUnet-developers] Search wildcards, and the mail archive

[Nathan Lutchansky]

Heheh...  When I glanced at this message in my mail folder, my mind 
quickly misread your name as the more widely-known individual with the 
initials T B-L, and I did a double take.  :-)

On Fri, Jan 03, 2003 at 04:42:13AM +0000, Tom Barnes-Lawrence wrote:
>  I'd already sort of guessed that GNUnet probably wasn't able to
> return every file stored on a node, but I'd wondered about using
> specific keywords such as "SOMETHING" or "ANYTHING" or "WHATEVER"
> to give files so that they would be likely to turn up if a user
> just wanted some sort of a broad sample of various things (sort of
> like the test content, but more the sort of things that people
> might want)- or maybe things that people thought were worth getting.

Not a bad idea.  There could be an issue with having a great deal of 
content indexed under the same keyword, but I don't know how the keyword 
indexes are designed.  Maybe more descriptive keywords like "PUBLICDOMAIN" 
or "FREELYDISTRIBUTABLE" would be better, since they describe a specific 
subset of content that should be legal to posess in most free countries.

Another mechanism along the same lines would be some sort of persistent
"announce" protocol, kind of like the chat protocol, except that messages
would stick around for a set amount of time.  Then gnunet-insert(-multi)  
could automatically announce the availability of new files using messages
that persist for, say, 48 hours.  Nodes could discover the availability of
new content without having to repeatly search for generic keywords.  This
would probably help get the GNUnet community bootstrapped, in terms of 
both keeping new users interested and in migrating content across the 
network more quickly.

But in the meantime, searching by MIME type works remarkably well, and has 
the added benefit that you find content in the intended format.  -Nathan

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