google is better than a p2p network..
this's out of my experience.. while searching for some mp3s or softwares, I've found google to be more useful than a p2p network.. at least better than the eDonkey that I use.. I agree that there're a lot of factors involved, but at least for me, it works..

for instance, I was lookin for some audio converter and the first thing I did was to search for it in eDonkey.. it returned me some results and I ask it to download one of em.. it's just abt 3MB.. half an hour later, no progress.. it's still lookin for some peers! damn.. so I thought of googling for it, tho I dint have any hopes that it'd work.. I look for ppl who've left their folders browsable and have this software listed there.. second result returned from google had what I wanted.. I couldn't believe it myself! and the Donkey is still lookin for peers..

I tried this out for a few mp3s and softwares and finally came to this conclusion..

but there are quite a few factors involved for this to be true..
1. if u have a static IP assigned to u, chances are that p2p works better.. else, google is the way to go

2. google doesn't always return what u want.. for the google way to work, somebody must have left their directory, containing the item you want, browsable (which mostly is a case of misconfigured server than an intentionally left open directory).. huh.. don't the odds seem to be very low? but no.. at least in my case, most of the times, I've been able to locate the stuff I want, using google..

3. coming to my factor ;) maybe I've not understood how p2p networks work.. maybe I'd find a way to optimise my p2p search tomorrow.. but at least till then, this holds good :)

btw, my usual search string to find out browsable folders is:
intitle:"Index of" "Last Modified" "C=M;O=D"
append the item u're lookin for to this string and odds are that google will return somethin useful.. "C=M;O=D" is kind of optional coz it's a lil optimisation that I add.. it narrows down the results to only proper browsable directories (yea, there ARE fake browsable directories, just to attract ppl like us and waste our time;) ).. but sometimes it gets rid of some positives, which's bad..

I wonder what all does the Google databses contain.. are there many places where it's crawlers don't reach? sometimes I feel, if you can find the proper question to ask, it can find you the answer you're lookin for..