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The fact that it got absolutely hammered in popularity by BitTorrent is the proof.

The only proof you get from BitTorrent being more popular than eMule is that BitTorrent is more popular than eMule. Doesn't mean eMule doesn't work for what it's supposed to do. "Crappy results" is at least possible with eMule while BitTorrent needs to rely on centralized tracking. That eMule still exists, is being used and no one has been able to stop it is proof to me that it does work.

Every single file sharing client other than bittorrent had search. BitTorrent easily beat them all. You can argue if you want that this is a pure coincidence, but it's not going to be very convincing.

> Every single file sharing client other than bittorrent had search

Sure, but decentralized search? Not many offers that, at even less of them still exists today.

> Bitcoin easily beat them all.

I'm sorry but what? Do you even know what Bitcoin is? How would Bitcoin help me search and download files today?

Sorry, typo. BitTorrent, obviously.

And why would the centralised or decentralised nature of the search affect user behaviour?

Why do you think decentralized technologies still help people pirate software to this day while centralized services eventually gets shut down? The amount of trackers that has disappeared over the years is huge, and some of them quite sad as well. What.CD would be a famous example where we basically had a enormous backup of long lost music in the world. What.CD disappeared when French authorities managed to figure out where the servers were and got permission to raid them.

Same thing happened with TPB a couple of times, but amazingly it's still standing. We can only hope it remains so, but in the future we might not be as lucky. Not to say that plenty countries block access to TPB via having the ISPs block DNS/IP to known addresses.

All of these things wouldn't have been a problem if the search index was also decentralized.

But that isn't something that would drive user behaviour until the search is actually taken down.

Let's go back. The initial claim is "the crappy results of EMule/GNUtella and friends as a proof "decentralized X" does not really work"

Then you claim that since BitTorrent is more popular than eMule, that means "decentralized X" doesn't work.

How is it relevant what would drive the user behavior?

You had a gigantic list of servers and didn't have to care if law enforcement managed to ban a few dozen? You could also search for anything shared by your peers. Major downside was that it wasn't curated and files tended to be shared under a dozen different names, so just because you think you were downloading Debian.iso didn't mean that it wasn't xXx_AnalCompilation5_xXx.avi, you had to check which name was the most frequent to be sure.

OP probably mistyped 'Bitcoin' instead of 'BitTorrent'.

Popularity has absolutely nothing to do with centralized search sites. Nothing technical ever prevented "ed2k-based Pirate Bays" to take off the same way, it's just that eMule included search so sites were never required

15 years ago, when I was using eMule, I made the switch to Torrent because Torrent was way faster for me. That's all.

ShareReactor was a user submitted index of content on the eDonkey network and its layout and functionality were clearly an influence on the not-yet-created Pirate Bay: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ShareReactor

When SR was at its peak, that was also ed2k's peak. In my teen and possibly post-teen years, I managed to upload some hard to find (pirated) pieces of software on the network and indexed on SR.

A quick search some months back showed there were still some of them available (via a tag I used) which was a pretty fun discovery considering they're almost 20 years old.

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