Kad search tips

[FLL]

Since searching via servers is getting less reliable and servers are going offline, many who haven't used Kad will need to do so. Here are some things I have noticed about searching using Kad. This is based entirely on my experience rather than any documentation anywhere, so if anyone knows more please chime in. In particular I almost never use boolean searches so I don't know about them.

I am using the Morph mod which as far as I know doesn't search any differently than the standard eMule client. I really don't know if different clients process searches differently. I will show the exact text I type into the search box as red.


1. In Kad, only the first word is actually asked for from other clients. (Unless you use the boolean search OR, but I am talking about simple searches which match all the words you type). For example, when searching for sunday daughters eMule uses Kad to search for sunday and then throws away all responses it gets which doesn't also have the word daughters in the title.

HOWEVER... search terms after the first are filtered as substrings, not as whole words. Thus searching for sunday daught will still return all the results sunday daughters does, plus maybe a few more (for example if the filename is Sunday Daughtrs).

This can be extremely useful if you think the title may be misspelled or have accented (or improperly unaccented) characters... search for substring(s) which leave the accented character out.

This is NOT how searching with a server works, searching a server for sunday daught won't return any files with the word daughters in them.

But remember Kad still requires the first search word match completely, so searching for sund daughters won't match at all.


2. As you can see when you try to search for my girl, Kad requires you search for keywords of at least 3 letters. The search is rejected.

HOWEVER... Because of what I said in #1 above, substrings you are searching for after the first word can be shorter than 3 letters. And there is no requirement that the words you search for be in the same order in the filename as in the search. So to search for the movie My Girl you can search for girl my. Voila! Remember though that the search strings can be anywhere in the filename, so you will get a lot of links you don't want which happen to have my anywhere in them.

More when (if) I think of it...

[emuler]

Nice tut. Thanks.

[FLL]

Tip 3...

If you don't find what you are looking for in a two word search, reverse the words and try again. (Assuming both words are at least 3 characters long). You will often get different results.

One major reason for this is that KAD works by turning individual clients into "mini-servers" which each remember files with specific keywords. So a search for secret andes will be sent to a mini-server for secret and a search for andes secret will be sent to a different mini-server, one which handles andes. Just like with the big ed2k servers, two mini-servers won't always know about the same files.

[mongodisco]

nice one FLL *bookmarked*. Hadn't tested these things