Re: [circle] circle web search wishlist (long)

[Thomas Voegtlin]

Soooo, you definitely want to remove the Google monopoly?
That's ambitious...

A few remarks:

- You do not need to have your nodes crawl the web. Simply using the 
cache of
your user's web browser should do a better job (and greatly simplify 
your project)

- Not all circle users will be willing to store 200MB of cache, plus the 
zillion hashtable
links that go with it, plus the extra bandwidth use, if they do not use 
your system.

This points to a more general issue, namely that in the current 
implementation
of Circle, all nodes accept to generously store links for everybody. 
However, some
people might use chat and not be interested in filesharing, some others 
just the
opposite. Why would a chat-only user want to store links to mp3 files? 
Why would
the part of the hashtable that contains the list of users on a channel 
be maintained
by someone who never uses chat?

(not to mention obvious attacks by saturation)

This generous policy should probably be modified before new services are 
added
to the Circle. I can see two possible ways to improve on that:
1.- A node should participate only in the services that it uses. This 
makes the
most sense, however it would require big changes to the current 
implementation.
2.- A node should maintain a rough balance between the number of links 
it publishes
and the number of links it maintains for the other nodes (i.e. 'store 
link for'). This
is more compatible with the current implementation, and it would be the 
first step
toward detecting attacks by saturation.