From: "coderman" <[email protected]> > But this begs a second question. Does the current infrastructure provided by > Freenet allow a flexible searching mechanism to be added with little effort?
I see a problem with distributing the search queries and answers through the network. In Freenet, requests for keys are not being broadcasted, but sent to a chain of nodes, up to 100 of them. If one of those nodes knows the key, the search is successful. The direction the chain takes can also be influenced by individual nodes if they know in which part of the network a specific range of keys might be found. This is what makes Freenet scale. How does this translate to fuzzy searching? Suppose we distribute the meta information along with the data itself. Then, basically, the chance of finding the metadata you're looking for is just as high as finding regular files. But, for scalable metadata searches, we need nodes that specialize in certain types of queries (automatically, just like specialization in Freenet works for keys). This is probably feasible, but at least it requires a new architecture; the mechanisms that Freenet currently offers don't suffice. So I would say, separate fuzzy search from the Freenet core. And I don't hope anyone considers broadcasting an alternative. Basically, Gnutella is trying to solve the same problem we're discussing right now (except for the insert mechanism that doesn't exist in Gnutella). So we could learn from their experiences. Another thought comes to my mind (should have been a separate mail I guess) -- it is not good if data and metadata are usually on the same node. This will practically eliminate deniability. With metadata, you know what's in your data store; without it, you don't. Of course, any search facility (eg freegle) that is easily accessible can be used as some sort of "negative list" to filter keys. (And thus courts may expect node operators to use these lists to keep their nodes "clean" of whatever content someone disapproves of.) But still, the situation is different when the metadata is delivered to your node along with the data itself. Then you don't have to query any external indices. You could even write (or be forced to write...) a simple piece of code that scans the node for, say, *.mp3 and removes the corresponding files. I hope this made any sense :-) -Stefan _______________________________________________ Devl mailing list Devl at freenetproject.org http://lists.freenetproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devl
