Re: more on gnutella

[Frank Walker <walker@nlm.nih.gov>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Karen Coyle" <karen.coyle@ucop.edu>
To: <oss4lib-list@biomed.med.yale.edu>
Sent: Friday, May 26, 2000 5:18 PM
Subject: Re: more on gnutella


> When I give lectures to computer science classes about the Net and
> information organization, I used to use Archie as an example -- basically
a
> crude gnutella that allowed you to find files on the Net by their file
> name. I likened it to the level of information retrieval in medieval
> monasteries -- an unordered title list. This leads to an easy discussion
of
> how such a thing doesn't scale when you go beyond a small number of items,
> and how it requires users to have special knowledge of those items in
order
> to retrieve them.
>
> Now I'm going to incorporate gnutella and Napster into my talks,
> illustrating the same thing (since most university students today have no
> idea what Archie was). Essentially, it's a highly automated version of a
> nearly useless information retrieval method based on users knowing the
> existence of and names of their target. It's a phone book, not an
> information retrieval system. If you want an information retrieval system,
> you'll need something much more sophisticated. And probably some
librarians.
>

I agree that right now gnutella is at a rather crude state as far as
retrieval of
information is concerned.  Limiting retrieval to names of files really does
put us
back in the days of Archie.  However, the good news is that this software is
supposed
be OSS, which means that real value can be added to it when the source code
becomes available.  With the right programming it should be possible
to create a version of gnutella that creates an index of key terms produced
through a
text search of any text documents being made available through the gnutella
server on a person's computer.  The index would be updated whenever new
files are added to those being distributed
from the computer.  Then, when queries come in from the Internet, the
quality of information
retrieval from the gnutella server could be made equivalent to that obtained
through a
search engine.

Frank Walker
National Library of Medicine