A Gnutella crawler is a software program used to gather statistic information on the
gnutella
Gnutella is a peer-to-peer network protocol. Founded in 2000, it was the first decentralized peer-to-peer network of its kind, leading to other, later networks adopting the model.
In June 2005, Gnutella's population was 1.81 million compute ...
file sharing
File sharing is the practice of distributing or providing access to digital media, such as computer programs, multimedia (audio, images and video), documents or electronic books. Common methods of storage, transmission and dispersion include r ...
network, such as the number of users, the market share of different clients and the geographical distribution of the userbase.
Early crawlers used the
Ping/Pong messages to discover hosts connected to the network. Although this method is still usable, it is too slow to capture enough data for a topological overview of the gnutella network as it requires initiating full gnutella connections; this involves several roundtrips to perform the header processing. An extension has been added to the gnutella protocol to allow crawlers to quickly access
ultrapeers. Right now, there is no publicly accessible crawler online on the
gnutella
Gnutella is a peer-to-peer network protocol. Founded in 2000, it was the first decentralized peer-to-peer network of its kind, leading to other, later networks adopting the model.
In June 2005, Gnutella's population was 1.81 million compute ...
network, since the last one hosted by
Lime Wire LLC has been taken down.
Gnutella2
Gnutella2, often referred to as G2, is a peer-to-peer protocol developed mainly by Michael Stokes and released in 2002.
While inspired by the gnutella protocol, G2 shares little of its design with the exception of its connection handshake and ...
(G2) also supports crawlers for the gain of statistical data such as the network size or the network composition (clients, versions, usernames and usercountries).
Right now, there is only one crawler existing on the G2 network, called ''g2paranha''. It is written and maintained by dcat and licensed under the
GPL
The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general u ...
.
See also
*
web crawler
A Web crawler, sometimes called a spider or spiderbot and often shortened to crawler, is an Internet bot that systematically browses the World Wide Web and that is typically operated by search engines for the purpose of Web indexing (''web spid ...
References
* Daniel Stutzbach and Reza Rejaie,
Capturing Accurate Snapshots of the Gnutella Network, the Global Internet Symposium, March, 2005.
External links
- An old, but still valid document on Gnutella network crawling.
The GDF:Communicating Network Topology InformationIon Sampler- a statistical crawler that estimates the number of nodes in the Gnutella overlay.
- a distributed crawler that gives some of the best estimates of Gnutella's size.
Gnutella
File sharing software
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