Searching Setup Page

Hidden Extensions

Enabling hide files and adding file extensions to the list will prevent those types of files from being displayed as search results. This does not affect outgoing search results, only your display of incoming results in the list.

Visual Basic Scripting files (.vbs files) usually contain viruses. There is almost no good reason to download a .vbs file. The initial BearShare configuration filters .vbs files and .exe files from search results.

You can read more about computer viruses, and ways to prevent them, here, here, or here.

Filter Results

Some Gnutella clients return search results incorrectly, that don't match your search string. Checking this box will scan all reported search results to make sure they match. This consumes additional CPU resources so if you are perfoming large searches on a slower system you might try turning this off to see if it helps.

Tip: When searching for MP3 files, some programs return files if your search keywords were located in the MP3 meta tags. These tags contain the artist and title of the song. So if you issue a search for "Mozart", other programs may return a file named "Track 1.mp3" which is the first track of a Mozart CD. If you are searching for specific MP3 files, consider turning off Filter Results to find the largest possible set of matching files.

Passive Search

Passive Search mode inspects all incoming search results to see if they match your search, even if the results were not intended for you. This consumes additional CPU resources, so if you are receiving high volumes of search results and you are experiencing high CPU utilization you can try turning this off to see if it helps. The rate of incoming search results is reported in the Statistics Page.

Maximum Search Results

Turning on the checkbox and entering a value for the maximum number of search results will limit the number of files returned to each search to this value. This does not affect your searches, it only affects other users searches against your shared files.

If you are sharing a large number of files, this is one of the most important settings in BearShare for managing your bandwidth. The largest part of your bandwidth consumption for host connections will be your search results, when sharing large numbers of files. After changing this setting, you can observe the impact on bandwidth by checking the Monitor Page.

In conjunction with the minimum search keywords setting (below), proper adjustment of these values can allow you to return more files to users sending specific searches, and less files to overly broad or general queries.

Minimum Search Characeters

This box controls the minimum number of characters in each keyword that is part of one search for the keyword to be considered in the search. Searches whose keywords are all below the minimum are discarded. This does not affect your searches, only the searches of other users against your shared files.

Setting this value to 4 or higher will eliminate a large percentage of overly broad or general queries. Setting the value to 3 or below will result in many files being returned to other users. If you can afford the bandwidth, FreePeers recommends leaving the number at 3.

Faster/Better Search Optimization

This option controls the behavior of the FreePeers agent when examining your shared files against searches. When Return the most popular files is selected, every time a file is matched it is 'bumped' up in the rank order of shared files. This bumping process can be observed in the Monitor Page. If your minimum search characters is 4 or higher, then over time the most frequently requested files will rise to the top of your search list. This will reduce the CPU resources used when searching your files. If the minimum search characters is 3 or less, then over time the most frequently returned files will tend to be the ones that were already at the top of the shared file list in rank order.

Without the shuffle feature, returning the most popular files usually results in files with names that come first in the alphabet becoming most frequently returned. Since BearShare shuffles the shared file list every time it launches, this exposes a wider variety of your files to broad or general searches.

When the Return a different subset of files is turned on, BearShare moves files that match a search to the bottom of the shared file list. This will increase the consumption of CPU resources, since the entire shared file list must be traversed to find a popular file, but it also has the effect of returning a different set of files every time to very general searches. This movement process is reflected in the Monitor Page. For example, if your maximum search results setting is set to 5, then the first incoming search for 'mp3' would return the first ten .mp3 files from your shared file list. This ten would be random, since the list is shuffled. The next incoming search for 'mp3' would return the next different set of .mp3 files. Only after the entire list has been traversed would the original ten .mp3 files be returned.

BearShare and the FreePeers Agent have been the subject of numerous optimizations and fine tunings, so in practice you might not notice the effect of changing this setting on your CPU utilization unless you have very high numbers of files, a slow CPU, a low amount of installed RAM, or possibly a slower hard disk drive; However, this information is provided to you so you may make an educated decision on what settings are best for your purposes. Note that none of these shuffling, moving, or bumping processes affect the file index which is used to uniquely identify the file in search results. This eliminates the disturbance to other users caused by changing file indexes.

We recommend the Better setting, in order to expose a wider variety of files to the file sharing public, unless your experimentation indicates that your performance is adversely affected.