A number of prior efforts analyzed the behavior of popular peer-to-peer (P2P) systems and proposed ways for maintaining
the overlays as well as methods for searching for contents using these overlays. However, little was known about how
successful users could be in locating the shared objects in these system. There might be a mismatch between the way
content creators named objects and the way such objects were queried by the consumers. Our aim was to examine the
terms used in the queries and shared object names in the Gnutella file-sharing system. We analyzed the object names of
over 20 million objects collected from 40,000 peers as well as terms from over 230,000 queries. We observed that almost
half (44.4%) of the queries had no matching objects in the system regardless of the overlay or search mechanism used to
locate the objects. We also evaluated the query success rates against random peer groups of various sizes (200, 1K, 2K, 3K,
4K, 5K, 10K and 20K peers sampled from the full 40,000 peers). We showed that the success rates increased rapidly from
200 to 5,000 peers, but only exhibited modest improvements when increasing the number of peers beyond 5,000. Finally,
we observed Zipf-like distribution for query terms and the object names. However, the relative popularity of a term in the
object names did not correlate with the terms popularity in the query workload. This observation affected the ability of
hybrid P2P systems to guide searches by creating a synopsis of the peer object names. A synopsis created by using the
distribution of terms in the object names need not represent relevant terms for the query. Our results can be used to guide
the design of future P2P systems that are optimized for the observed object names and user query behavior.
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