When the World Wide Web started, that's how it was. It used to be that I would put up a web page, you would link to it, and I would link to yours. To get around, we would all "surf the links". The web was a web. But shortly after, the likes of Yahoo! and Lycos came on the scene to build search engines, or information portals. You go to one place to find all the information. Ideally that would be true. The problem with portals? They stuff you with ads. They are outdated. They basically control the flow of information. (Proven in a recent IBM/Altavista study of the Internet.)

Now, however, Gnutella puts the personal interaction back into the Internet. When you run a Gnutella software and connect to the Gnutella Network, you bring with you the information you wanted to make public. That could be nothing, it could be one file, a directory, or your entire hard drive (I wouldn't recommend this option).

The power behind this is amazing. That data which you have bothered to keep on your hard disk is what you found to be valuable. So when you share it you are sharing what is most valuable on the entire Internet. And you control its sharing. Decide to stop sharing? Go ahead and take those files offline. Want to share more? Select more files and share them. It's really that easy, and the power of sharing information is just unquantifiable.

Gnutella client software is basically a mini search engine and file serving system in one. When you search for something on the Gnutella Network, that search is transmitted to everyone in your Gnutella Network "horizon". If anyone had anything matching your search, he'll tell you.

So, time to give a brief explanation of the "horizon". When you log onto the Gnutella network, you are sort of wading into a sea of people. People as far as the eye can see. And further, but they disappear over the horizon. So that's the analogy. When you log on, you see the host counter start going crazy. That's because everyone in your horizon is saying "Hello" to you. After a while, it stops counting so rapidly, because you've counted most everyone in your horizon. Over time the people in the horizon change, so you'll see the counter move slowly.

If you log in another day, you should see a whole bunch of fresh faces, and maybe you'll have waded into a different part of the network. A different part of the crowd. Different information.

You might say, "Well, what if what I want doesn't exist within my horizon? The horizon never seems to grow beyond 10000 hosts!" True. If the information you want isn't in your horizon, you're out of luck. But hopefully it is. It's a probability game. Fortunately information is duplicated. Everyone's got that joke about the way men choose urinals, for example.

And what of the 10000-user horizon? That's just the network "scaling". The Gnutella Network scales through segmentation. Through this horizoning thing. It wouldn't do to have a million people in the horizon. The network would slow to a crawl. But through evolution, the network sort of organizes itself into little 10000-computer segments. These segments disjoin and rejoin over time. I leave my host on overnight and it will see upwards of 40000 other hosts.

Gnutella Is Filesharing

Okay, so you've got Napster, and you've got SpinFrenzy, and you've got CuteMX. And you've got FTP sites, web pages, and all kinds of other stuff. And you still can't find what you want.

Enter Gnutella. Gnutella is the answer to your prayers. Searching for that recipe for strawberry-rhubarb pie? Can't find the latest version of Linux on a T3 or better link? It's probably out there on the GnutellaNet.

What's great about Gnutella is that it isn't focused on trading MPEG music the way the other guys are. There is all kinds of stuff on the GnutellaNet, and when you get a search hit, it's virtually guaranteed to be there. No stale links. No irrelevant hits. And if you don't want to download your recipes from someone in Belize with a 2400 bps link, you just set that in your query.

The other half of Gnutella is giving back. Almost everyone on GnutellaNet shares their stuff. Every client on the GnutellaNet is also a server, so you not only can find stuff, but you can also make things available for the benefit of others. So if you've got a good recipe for blueberry cobbler, you could answer someone's prayers by sharing it with the rest of the GnutellaNet!

Gnutella Is Anonymous

One of the problems with Napster and others like it is that they are centralized. A centralized place for government agencies to impinge upon your freedom to search the net. All those commercial realtime search engines probably keep logs so they can target ads at you. At least they keep logs so they know how many searches they get per day so they can tell it to their investors. And they probably run some data mining to figure out how many people searched for MP3's, how many people searched for recipes, etc. All that so they can figure out exactly what their customer is like.

Gnutella puts a stop to all those shenanigans. When you send a query to the GnutellaNet, there is not much in it that can link that query to you. I'm not saying it's totally impossible to figure out who's searching for what, but it's pretty unlikely, and each time your query is passed, the possibility of discovering who originated that query is reduced exponentially. More on that in the next section.

In short, there is no safer way to search without being watched.

A big however, however. To speed things up, downloads are not anonymous. Well, we have to make compromises. But again, nobody's keeping logs, and nobody's trying to profile you.

Gnutella Is The Game : Telephone

Remember the game telephone? Yeah, you know...someone whispers something to you, and you're supposed to whisper that to someone else, and so on and so on? And the guy at the end of the chain got a whisper that sounded nothing like the original whisper. Well, Gnutella is similar in many ways.

When you say to GnutellaNet, "Hey, find strawberry-rhubarb pie recipes.", you are actually saying, "Hey, my close friends, could you tell me if you've seen any recipes for strawberry-rhubarb pie? And while you're at it, ask your close friends too. And ask them to ask their friends." It's obvious that after just a few rounds of this, you've got a lot of friends working on finding that recipe! And, it's pretty much impossible for any one person to know who asked the question in the first place. Two beautiful things about Gnutella.

So suppose some guy, 6 degrees from you (your friend's friend's friend's friend's friend's friend), has the world's best recipe for strawberry-rhubarb pies. He tells the guy who asked him. That guy tells the guy who asked him... And ultimately the answer gets back to you. But only one person in the whole world knows that you're the original person who asked. And guess what? In GnutellaNet, we even fix that. The guy you asked originally doesn't even know that you're the person who's really asking the question. Err...searching for that strawberry-rhubarb pie recipe. So you get your answer, and you don't have to admit to anyone that you're a pantywaist.

Could it get any better?

Gnutella Is Designed to Survive Nuclear War

The GnutellaNet concept is not to have one massive Gnutella service provider that can go down and bring the whole world to a screeching halt. If, say, New York was hit by Dr. Evil, GnutellaNet probably wouldn't even notice. So you lose your "Gnutella friends" in New York. Big deal. It's unlikely that New York is the only place where people share the recipe for strawberry-rhubarb pie.

You don't have to stand around in your kitchen for the next three hours waiting for some geek to switch the DNS from GlobalCenter to Exodus. You just issue your query, and some guy in Texas jumps up and down and waves his Gnutella hands in the air and says, "Pardner, I've got a recipe for strawberry-rhubarb pie that'll have you salivating like a dog in heat."

Gnutella Can Withstand A Band of Hungry Lawyers

Gnutella can withstand a band of hungry lawyers. How many realtime search technologies can claim that? Not Napster, that's for sure. Just to emphasize how revolutionary this is: hungry lawyers are probably more destructive than nuclear weapons.

There are a few things that will prevent Gnutella from being stopped by lawyers, FBI, etc. First, Gnutella is nothing but a protocol. It's just freely-accessible information. There is no company to sue. No one entity is really responsible for Gnutella.

Second, Gnutella is not there to promote the piracy of music. It's a technology, not a music-piracy tool.

The important thing is that Gnutella will be here tomorrow. It's reliable, it's sharing terabytes of data, and it is absolutely unstoppable.

Download a client and get on the Gnutella network

Mirrored from http://gnutella.wego.com/ (with permission).