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Changes in queries in Gnutella peer-to-peer networks

Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, yang{at}se.cuhk.edu.hk

James S.H. Kwok

Department of Information Systems, College of Business Administration, California State University, Long Beach, USA

Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks have been drawing significant attention in the area of information management and sharing recently. Unlike the World Wide Web (WWW), every peer in a P2P network is both client and server. It hosts information for sharing and submits queries to search for information from all of the other peers at the same time. There are a large number of studies related to the information behavior of WWW search engines in the US and Europe. Several issues have been investigated in these studies including number of unique and repeat queries, length of queries, terms being used in queries, successive searching, multitasking searching, multiple searching sessions, changes of topics, multimedia searching, etc. The number of similar studies in P2P networks is significantly less. We have previously studied the information behavior of Gnutella P2P network based on data collected in 2002. In this paper, we present changes in Gnutella queries, based on the previously collected data and new data collected in 2003. Similar metrics to those used by Spink, Wolfram, Jansen, and Saracevic and in our previous study are used. We found that the number of non-English queries has increased. The number of repeat queries in P2P has decreased but is still more than that for WWW search engines. The length of queries has been increased by about 40%. The topics of interest have shifted from entertainment and sexuality to computers and entertainment. In general, the information behavior of P2P users has been changing as the P2P technology becomes more mature and the P2P users become more familiar with the technology. As the P2P technology begins to be adopted in e-Business, we foresee that there will be more changes in the future.

Key Words: peer-to-peer networks • World Wide Web • information behaviour

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