Is Freenet searchable?
No search mechanism has yet been implemented. One of the design goals was to make it impossible to locate the exact place where any piece of information is stored. Even a server operator cannot determine what is stored at his own node. This naturally makes searching very difficult. Information is currently retrieved by “keys” which should be guessable, or communicated by some other means. Proposals for adding safe searching and indexing capabilities to Freenet are being discussed for the future. For example, Freenet documents can contain hyperlinks which could be spidered in the same way as the web. Alternately, lists of keywords or other metadata could be circulated through the network.
Yes, there are a few different search mechanisms. To search the freenet web, go to the plugins page, load the XMLLibrarian plugin if it isn’t already there, and use that. Alternatively, Frost and Thaw also provide searching for messages and files. Note that searching on Freenet is a good deal more difficult than on other networks because of Freenet’s different architecture and design goals. How do I get freenet working with a Firewall/NAT? Mostly, Freenet should just work with a NAT. However, you should forward the ports manually if you can. Click on the Friends or Strangers page. At the bottom you will see a list of ports used by the node. You should forward (for UDP) the Darknet FNP and Opennet FNP ports. You may need to look up your router’s documentation to figure out how to do this. Freenet should have forwarded them itself through Universal Plug and Play, but this doesn’t always work (and it never works if you don’t have the UPnP plugin loaded, or have one router behind another).
No search mechanism has yet been implemented. One of the design goals was to make it impossible to locate the exact place where any piece of information is stored. Even a server operator cannot determine what is stored at his own node. This naturally makes searching very difficult. Information is currently retrieved by “keys” which should be guessable, or communicated by some other means. Proposals for adding safe searching and indexing capabilities to Freenet are being discussed for the future. For example, Freenet documents can contain hyperlinks which could be spidered in the same way as the web. Alternately, lists of keywords or other metadata could be circulated through the network.
