BearShare and LimeWire

PC Magazine, by Cade Metz

Finally, we looked at two services, BearShare and LimeWire, that use the Gnutella network, which bloomed during the heyday of Napster. Because these services have so few users—as of November, BearShare had only 700,000 and LimeWire had even fewer—they're not nearly as effective as Morpheus or even WinMX. While testing BearShare, we found only the MP3 of Fitzgerald's "Miss Otis Regrets" and the copy of WinZip; with LimeWire, we found only the WinZip file.

BearShare eMule LimeWire KaZaa Zwinky Ringtones AVG

In an effort to attract more users, LimeWire's new beta client, Version 2.1.1, applies the super node concept to Gnutella's more traditional peer-to-peer architecture, creating what the company calls ultrapeers. Over the next several weeks, BearShare will likely add such technology to its service as well.

If the addition of ultrapeers can indeed lead to greater usage of these services, LimeWire and BearShare might soon be as attractive as WinMX and the FastTrack services. BearShare lets you perform multiple searches at once, and none of your searches will stop until you tell them to. LimeWire's search engine isn't quite as clever, but the application does offer a built-in MP3 player. Both programs provide swarm downloading and automatically resume interrupted downloads.