As of April 23, 2007, the most popular Bit Torrent search engine sites are listed below. This list is selected from hundreds of reader email suggestions, Votes and Surveys. But this list should not be considered up to the mark by any means.
Warning for new users: while P2P file sharing technology is completely legal, many of the files traded through P2P are copyrighted. Unless you live in Canada where users are shielded from P2P lawsuits, then downloading P2P files may put you at risk for a civil lawsuit in any other country.These lawsuits are usually class-action suits, filed against groups of users who blatantly copy and distribute copyrighted materials. Recently, the MPAA, the RIAA, and the governments of England and Australia took several thousand users to court, demanding that they pay thousands of dollars in copyright infringement penalties.
Your Internet Service Provider may, at their discretion, release their logs of your downloading activity to potential copyright plaintiffs. The more megabytes you download, the more you risk being sued by copyright protection groups. Please know this risk before you use any of the following Torrent search engines below.
- Demonoid (Demonoid is also a major tracker database that supports thousands of swarms around the globe. Even better, the Demonoid community polices itself by monitoring how much each member actually shares files. (“Leeches” are not tolerated at Demonoid). Note: because new memberships at Demonoid are scarce, you will need to be patient and committed if you wish to join.)
- Torrentportal.com
- Snarf It! (born from previous Suprnova influences)
- The Pirate Bay (Pirate Bay, by readership size, is the most popular torrent search site today. Pirate Bay has an immense database of 360,000 torrents, the third largest database after Isohunt and Torrentspy.)
(May 31, 2006: The Pirate Bay has been shut down by Swedish authorities. Details are available on the Pirate Bay home page.)
(June 2006: The Pirate Bay has restarted operations, now that the police have duplicated the PB hard drives for forensic purposes. Enjoy this database while it is still around, folks!) - Scrapetorrent.com is another torrent meta-search engine that is gaining popularity.
- TorrentTyphoon.com (a unique bittorrent meta-search engine that searches several of the most popular sites. Unfortunately, it does not do a good job categorizing the torrent files themselves)
- Torrentbox.com FYI: like Isohunt, Torrentbox is being sued by the MPAA as of February 28, 2006. The days for this fine search engine may be numbered.
- Torrentspy.com offers over 420,000 torrents in its database, the largest torrent index that is readily available to the public. Enjoy it while you can.
- Torrentscan.com (a “meta-search” engine, which is a search engine that searches other search engines)
- Torrentreactor.to (Torrentreactor has made a comeback from a hijacking and an uncooperative hosting service. They have moved to a different server setup and a Tonga country domain outside the USA. Read the details on their home page.)
- Mininova.org has 150,000 torrents indexed as of December, 2006. Mininova is the successor to Suprnova, one of the original big torrent databases of the Web.
- Isohunt.com
January 22, 2007: Although Isohunt was suddenly shut down by its original ISP before the weekend, the administrators have relaunched the service on a new ISP with new hardware. There are still problems, but Isohunt does live for the time being. The MPAA lawsuit is slated for a March summary judgment, so make sure you use Isohunt now, while you still can.
January 8, 2007: Isohunt has nearly 400,000 torrents in their database. Also noteworthy: any Isohunt torrent listed as “ISOhunt release” means that it is a file verified by the administrators…a nice feature to help you locate authentic torrents and not fake files. On a sad note: Isohunt is being sued by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) for copyright infringement. If you want to use this tremendous Canadian site, you better use it while you can. - Torrentmatrix.com
- ByTorrents Meta Search
- BTjunkie
- Torrentz.com
- Torrents.to
- LegalTorrents.com (As the name implies, this is a database of public-domain content)
- Thinktorrent.com
- FileList.org
Special Mention:
ShareTV.org (ShareTV is dedicated to sharing television episodes and entire TV series. Find “24″, “Heroes”, and “Lost” episodes here.)
ShareTV.org (ShareTV is dedicated to sharing television episodes and entire TV series. Find “24″, “Heroes”, and “Lost” episodes here.)
Torrent-Finder.com (It “meta-searches” 159 torrent sites as of this writing.)
Source: about
Technorati Tags: 20 best torrent sites
No Comments Yet