—The current peer-to-peer (P2P) content distribution systems are constricted by their simple on-demand content discovery mechanism. The utility of these systems can be greatly enhanced by incorporating two capabilities, namely a mechanism through which peers can register their long term interests with the network so that they can be continuously notified of new data items, and a means for the peers to advertise their contents. Although researchers have proposed a few unstructured overlay-based publish-subscribe systems that provide the above capabilities, most of these systems require intricate indexing and routing schemes, which not only make them highly complex but also render the overlay network less flexible towards transient peers. This paper argues that for many P2P applications implementing full-fledged publish-subscribe systems is an overkill. For these applications, we study the alternate continuous query paradigm, which is a best-effort service providing the above two ca...