The “real-time” search approach YouTorrent introduced appealed to many users, and it is no surprise that most of the new meta-search engines that were inspired by it have been growing steadily. PizzaTorrent and NowTorrents serve hundreds and thousands of searches a day, and newcomers such as TorrentFly and the more basic looking Gpirate are picking up steam as well.

In March, we mentioned both PizzaTorrent and NowTorrents in our top 10 YouTorrent (meta-search) alternatives. Since then, a lot of things have changed, both in design and feature-wise. We decided to catch up with Godius, the founder of NowTorrents, to find out what’s happened since Spring.

“We recently re-coded and designed the whole website,” Godius told us. “The new site has a more user friendly layout and has a bunch of new features. For example it’s now possible to filter site-by-site results, filter keyword and categories, all in real-time. We also build a popular searches caching system, this has greatly improved loading times. And we added more personal search preference settings.”

One of the new features at NowTorrents (and Gpirate) is the BoxOffice listings. The MPAA probably won’t be too happy with such a feature, but the users love it according to Godius.

“We are planning to expand the BoxOffice torrents feature with a latest Games and Music Albums charts section. We have noticed that users greatly appreciate the BoxOffice section, so we feel that adding games and music charts will satisfy their needs even more. Many people don’t know what to search for; they just want to download the latest stuff that has just been released.”

Godius is not too worried about the MPAA showing up at his doorstep, as he told us: “Basically we are doing exactly what Google is doing only we do not list non-torrent related results. We feel as long as Google gets away with it, and the torrent sites we link to get away with it, we have nothing to worry about.”

One of the downsides of all these new meta-torrent search engines is that they all rely on a handful of BitTorrent trackers, and sites that actually host torrent files. Running a meta-search engine is easier, less costly, and probably safer from a legal point of view. Nevertheless, they become useless if there are no torrent files to index, or torrents to track.

Post from: TorrentFreak

torrentlog.com - Full movie downloads (dvdrips and divx)

Real-Time BitTorrent Search Engines Expand torrent downloads.

BitSmash will be launched officially on October 15th, but the website is already fully operational. The project looks promising, and might prove to be a great tool for those who are interested in BitTorrent trends, including ourselves. One of the major downsides at the moment, however, is the accuracy of some of the statistics that are reported by BitSmash.

We’ve gone through the data, and it seems that BitSmash is off on the numbers of seeds and peers. One of the top downloads according to the service is The Incredible Hulk, with 414 peers and 139 seeders. However, Mininova and several other BitTorrent sites report that the torrent has more than 15,000 peers, and a manual scrape of one of the trackers returned close to 18,000 peers.

The service is of course still being developed, so these numbers might be corrected later. Smash, the founder of the project told us: “I’m going to stand by our numbers,” but said he will take a look at the inconsistencies. He encourages everyone to submit feedback while the site is in Beta.

Interestingly, BitSmash has decided to include a link to the .torrent files on their detail pages, which basically makes it a meta-search engine as well. The anti-piracy lobby might not be too happy about that. A few days ago we reported on the Swedish news site Nyheter24, that was criticized for linking to torrents on The Pirate Bay.

The service will officially launch October 15th, and later this year there will also be an API available for other services and websites to access, who can use the data for other purposes. Overall we think that BitSmash could develop into a great research tool. It’s worth checking out.

Post from: TorrentFreak

torrentlog.com - Full movie downloads (dvdrips and divx)

BitSmash Launches BitTorrent Statistics Tool torrent downloads.

The Pirate Bay, Mininova and isoHunt combined achieve over a billion pageviews a month. These are quite remarkable statistics when you consider that together, the trio run on less than 100 servers (cf. Facebook has 10,000).

Despite all three sites being involved in lawsuits, they continue to attract more visitors, and thus more searches. Mininova and The Pirate Bay currently process between 7 and 8 million searches per day, roughly 230 million a month. isoHunt isn’t far behind though, as its users perform 6 million searches every day, totaling some 180 million a month.

As Slyck points out today, the larger BitTorrent sites are getting as many searches as eBay and Amazon. When combined, the three BitTorrent sites are good for half a billion searches every month, which equals half of MSN’s total search traffic (and 5% of Google’s searches). The major difference though, is that the BitTorrent sites are still growing, while Microsoft’s search engine traffic is declining.

Even though most people use BitTorrent to download TV-shows, the latest Hollywood blockbusters such as Wall-E and The Dark Knight can also be found among the most popular searches. An interesting trend worth mentioning is that more people are searching for high definition content, as ‘720p‘ is a recurring term in most site search clouds.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

BitTorrent Searches Skyrocket as Sites Grow

torrentlog.com - Full movie downloads (dvdrips and divx)

BitTorrent Searches Skyrocket as Sites Grow torrent downloads.

Usniff combines a great looking design with fast, real-time search results. The site currently allows users to search The Pirate Bay, Mininova, isoHunt and BitTorrent, and the search results can be sorted by file size, torrent name, search engine, upload date, peers and seeds.

TorrentFreak asked Samo, the founder of Usniff, why he started the site. “My inspiration was YouTorrent.com, before it sailed to clean waters,” he told us. “It is simple to use, responsive and has loads of good results for almost any search query. At that time I didn’t know about other similar meta-search engines, so I decided i’d try to make one myself - mostly for fun.”

The list of sites that can be searched through Usiff is currently limited to four, but Samo told us he plans to add more torrent sites in the near future. “I have not yet made a complete wish-list, but btmon.com, bitenova.nl and torrentbox.com will definitely be added in September,” he said.

Usniff does indeed have a similar look and feel as the old YouTorrent design. YouTorrent, launched in January 2008, quickly becoming the most successful new torrent site. The site initially indexed all the popular torrent sites, but switched to purely ‘verified’ torrents this April, after receiving legal threats.

Samo anticipates legal threats, but that’s not going to hold him back. “I actually do expect legal problems,” Samo told us. He thinks, however, that his site is completely legal, as it does not link to copyrighted material. “Worst case scenario is that i’ll have to move it to a server in a less strict country.”

We’ve seen a lot of new BitTorrent meta-search engines this year. Sites like this are a great resource to search multiple BitTorrent sites at once. Never forget though, that meta-search engines like this depend heavily on public trackers and sites that host the .torrent files - BitTorrent’s backbone. There aren’t too many of those left.

Usniff search results

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

Usniff, Torrent Search Made Easy

torrentlog.com - Full movie downloads (dvdrips and divx)

Usniff, Torrent Search Made Easy torrent downloads.