An index? That could be huge. I think it's senseless.
So many p2p protocols have support for p2p search (to my mind comes Kademlia), why can't BitTorrent have p2p search?
So many p2p protocols have support for p2p search (to my mind comes Kademlia), why can't BitTorrent have p2p search?
From the sibling comment (posted by swolchok)'s paper, a relevant quote:
"We chose to demonstrate our proof of concept only on Vuze due to the significant additional complexity of supporting two DHTs in the crawler. While Mainline does not contain torrent descriptions, its peer lists are keyed by the torrent infohashes themselves, so no additional machinery would be needed to discover infohashes. However, some method would be needed to discover torrent names, such as downloading .torrent files directly from peers using the metadata exchange protocol.
To explore this possibility, we built a prototype .torrent crawler. Since we are operating in the context of the Vuze DHT, our DHT crawler needs to obtain both a torrent description and a peer list before the .torrent crawler can contact the appropriate peers with the correct infohash. However, the .torrent files contain useful additional data, including the full listing of files contained in the torrent"
I wrote a paper on building a torrent search index quickly using the DHT records that this feature emitted at the time. [link redacted]