When to use p2p?

This morning I heard my two roommates talking about p2p searching. As doctors-to-be, they are under the pressure of publishing papers, and p2p is a fairly new idea in the searching field. One of them thought it'd be cool to have p2p searching while the other observed that he went to far.

If Google implemented its huge clusters with p2p technology, I would not be surprised. I would consider it cool and love Google more fanatically. But if I have to host some tiny portion of Google's database, and search a thousand people's machines for some terms while knowing that more people are searching mine, well, I personally don't think it's quite a good idea. It's not that it's like making your private house a public place. Not at all. Using bittorrent has already made it public. It's because p2p doesn't fit here.

If you look around and take a look at whatever you do that's p2p, most probably you'll see file sharing. Whether you have realized it, chatting and instant messaging is somewhat p2p, or at least somewhere p2p has crept into. And if there are any other daily routines that may be p2p, I don't know of them. What do you think made the file sharing and instant messaging pioneers in the p2p field?

Time is my answer to the question. Both of them can be time consuming. If you can download a file with ftp within a second (legally), why choose bittorrent? Bittorrent itself claims to be a technology to shorten the time people waits for downloading. Instant messaging itself doesn't cost much time, so long as only the software is concerned. However, if two people are talking over a network connection made up by the im, they often make the connection last.

My point is, when people have to do one thing for a long time, with the help of others, they won't deny others' request to help, at least not before they finish. That's how p2p work. If I want to download a file from many people, and when I'm downloading, I won't refuse to upload some and let other people download. However, once I'm done, I can promise nothing. I may have to shut down the computer and go to sleep. Nobody should expect my effort to keep the system up and running. I got my own business to mind.

That's the problem p2p searching got. If it's inside Google, well, those machines are born (or manufactured if you like) to search and cooperate with each other. They can be masters and slaves, or they can be peers. Democracy never goes into the corporations anyway. If it's outside, things are so different. Searching are expected to be done within one second -- Google promised much faster. Even if you search more than a thousand times a day, it doesn't add up to an hour, and maybe a lot less. When you're not searching, how can you be sure that you can help other people search? You may have the computer on, and plugged into the internet, but you may also have the p2p searching process a very low priority one in the shadowed background. Even if you wish to help, you don't necessarily be of much help.

I think p2p is very good thing, and I've been thinking a lot about it. But like anything else, p2p got its own weaknesses. Don't abuse the idea. Of course, if you're writing a paper to get your degree, I'm on your side.