Genny's File service, Sat, 13 Jan 2001 18:07:10 +0000

Greetings,
I'm over here trying to design the File finding and retrieving service for the Genny protocol. There are a number of things I want, but it's pretty cluttered. I'll put out my ideas here, and ask for more. And if you find a good way to organise them, post that too.
Searching types:
 Plain Gnutella style. All non-alphanumeric characters replaced with spaces. All words must then match. (Case insensitive.)
 Search engine style. Imitating AltaVista and the like. Support for
"phrase groupings", the +operator, the -operator, and case sensitivity for upper case characters.
 Basic regular expression. grep(1) style.
 Extended regular expression. egrep(1) style.
 Perl regular expression. perl style.
I don't like any of these searching types, but a technical type like myself would choose egrep style. (that's also easier to program for.)
There also needs to be opportunities for explicit filtering.
 No filtering. No search messages are denied from propogating.
 Technical filtering. Filtering only done to save bandwidth.
 Content filtering. Disagreeable searches (and hits?) dropped.
 Family filtering. Hypothetically child-safe searches. This could be quite different from Content filtering.
 Some combinations of the above.
I do not plan to make everyone use the same filter for each kind of filtering. I think most folks will end up only supporting technical and content filtering, which most people would use to drop flooding attempts and child porn searches. In other words, it will be up to each servant maintainer to create a filtering list based on the guidelines I will set out in the protocol document.
I also need to have the ability for caching. Which means search broadcasts can be marked for any kind, or for uncached results only.
Search replies (hits) will be marked as cached or not-cached.
Search replies must also be marked as cached or not cached. Search replies must also be marked as "allowed to cache" or "allowed to archive" or "don't cache or archive" or something. That has to be sorted out. I need the above so people can mark their search replies in a way that says no one is allowed to make gnutella.it style indexes of their shared files.
Not all of this stuff needs to be squashed into a single Genny service.
And I'm going to put a byte on the search results packet that shows much much upload the servant currently has available.
Well that's it for those thoughts right now. More will come later. :-)
TomG

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