P2P Information Behavior in Contrast with WWW Information Behavior

Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing is currently attracting enormous media attention, spurred by the popularity of file sharing systems such as Gnutella, eDonkey and BitTorrent. The peers are simply autonomous, or as some call them, first-class citizens. P2P networks provide a new distributed computing paradigm on the Internet for information sharing. The decentralized nature foster knowledge sharing and collaboration as well as cooperative and non-cooperative behaviors in sharing resources. Searching is a major component of P2P information sharing. This paper compares the information behavior in Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks and World Wide Web (WWW). Information behavior is defined as the totality of human behavior in relation to sources and channels of information [26]. Many studies on the nature of WWW search engines have been reported but very few studies were devoted to the information behavior in P2P networks. Although end-users of WWW search engines and P2P networks are basically the same group of Internet users, they behave differently in various application domains. We conducted experiments and collected data that describe P2P search behavior. Data mainly include searching queries, terms, and types. This paper focuses on P2P information behavior and contrasts our findings with reported WWW information behaviors by prior studies. We believe the results could provide insights to P2P designers and developers to build “better” P2P applications.