Last week isoHunt updated its indexing code and performed a thorough re-crawl of the indexed sites, resulting in an increase from 1.65 million to 3.49 million torrents. This week the team tackled another problem, namely, how to find the right torrent more effectively.
isoHunt’s founder Gary Fung mentioned that they made several changes to the search algorithms resulting in a superior quality of the search results. The changes should make it easier for the site’s users to find what they are looking for.
Aside from the improved results, the team also added option to narrow down the results to a specific source, Gary explained on Facebook.
isoHunt is currently the third largest torrent site ranked by the number of daily users.
Today it was repoted by Torrentfreak that according to a report in the Norwegian press today, some companies have reacted uncomfortably to the news that their Google Adwords text ads have been appearing on IsoHunt, the world’s third largest BitTorrent site.
Google has a policy of not displaying ads on sites that are involved in or linked to copyright infringement, with many torrent sites previously excluded from the scheme. Of course, some still carry Google ads, purely because Google is unaware of the nature of those sites, but with IsoHunt the situation is different. On IsoHunt the Google ads aren’t directly served by Google, but by Ask.com, a Google AdWords ‘reseller’.
Ask.com, formerly known as Ask Jeeves, works with several other BitTorrent sites. Only on IsoHunt have they displayed search based ads that came from Google AdWords campaigns. They have been doing so for several months, perhaps years, but up until now nobody complained, or knew.
In a statement, Jan-Henrik Ohme, head of digital marketing at Sony BMG said “We have stopped the section of the campaign that goes to the third party until Google cleans up the issues. We have contacted Google, and they took immediate action.”
For its part, Google Norway has apologized for the situation, and said that the advertisers should not be held responsible for the placement of the ads, since due to the 3rd party involvement, they had no way of knowing where they would appear. The campaigns are not limited to Norway though, and Ask.com certainly has something to explain to Google.
This situation was bound to happen but some of the companies dont really understand why it happened. Ask.com was only allowed to have their ads on Isohunt because the deal they started with Google was done after the Isohunt deal. Thus, Google allowed all historical deals to continue as normal. Therefore, it is impossible to now have Google ads on new bittorrent related sites.
Additionally, the ads are not done through Ask.com, they are from Ask.co.uk. This is because Ask.com sell their own adwords type program still and Ask.co.uk controls the Google Adwords reseller program.
As we all know Bittorrent sites are on the rise and continue to grow. That being said I thought I would just write a short but sweet article about this growth and try to work out if the internet and piracy is ever going to get control of these sites. Every month it seems as though there is a new bittorrent site on the net, but at the same time we keep hearing about torrent sites being taken down and people getting sued for piracy. That all being said is anyone going to take control of these types of sites on the internet and either change the world piracy laws or simply just allow them to exist and work out was to monetize their content for the content providers.
Currently, in Alexa there are 3 bittorrent sites in the top 120 worldwide, these sites are ThePirateBay.org, Mininova.org and isohunt.com. These sites are all run on the same basic premise, whatever you want is available for FREE. Below I have published the Compete graph which shows the basic traffic trends of all these sites, obviously rising at a steady pace. That being said Compete still has no grip at all on the traffic numbers for these sites, because they are probably about 100 times more than what they are on Compete.
Since these sites are so on the rise, how come they arent getting more widely accepted? Organisation like the IFPI and MPAA think that heavy handed tactics can get these sites shutdown and offline, but we all know deep down that is never going to happen. Now that is mainly never going to happen because of the piracy laws. Currently, the piracy laws are different in nearly every country in the world and these organisations and governments still havent realised that the Internet (in law terms) shouldnt be thought of differently in each country, but should really be through of as its own country. The internet should have its own universal laws that control the entire system, because otherwise the same cycle is going to happen for a long time to come.
Im not really anti bittorrent sites and im not totally the other way either. I just think the governments need to get their act together and start thinking of the internet as its own specific territory, and then these bittorrent sites would have to stick to these laws. Until that time bittorrents arent illegal and they are totally here to stay!
