BitSnoop is a new torrent search engine that is supposedly better than its rivals because of a new tactic it uses when searching for torrents; indexing and combining of torrents and getting rid of duplicated ones.The torrents are generated by Tracker Match. It locates all the relevant trackers to your search and removes duplicated torrents or ‘bad’ torrents to avoid slow downloads.
I think that the homepage which you can see above is quite nice as it’s minimalistic – after all it’s there for one purpose and one purpose only. Google has had much by employing the purposeful look by using minimal text and images. The results, seen below, are also well presented and spaced out; again a minimalistic look.
Overall, I thought it was okay. I didn’t really notice much of a change in my regular download speed but the fact that it was taking away duplicated torrents was comforting, I guess. Check it out for yourself here.
It was reported that The Pirate Bay was sold last month for $7.8 million. In the past few days there has been a lot more news about how The Pirate Bay will change within the new ownership and how they plan to turn the site into a legal entity.
The new owners GGF have appointed a new CEO Wayne Rosso who has previous experience in failing p2p services – came out with a few crucial additional details on the site’s future business model. osso said that under the new management, the 3.7 million Pirate Bay users (or whatever userbase remains) will have to pay a monthly fee to access the site.
The money collected from user subscriptions and advertising revenue will then be used to pay off the copyright holders. The exact monthly fee is yet to be decided, but Rosso did confirm that the more files people share, the lower it will be.
“The more of your computer resources you contribute to the network, the less you pay down to zero,” Rosso told Cnet.
I dont really think that new owners GGF understand the concept behind The Pirate Bay and that the only reason the community uses the site is because it is free. Thus a Pirate Bay in which users have to pay is going to do little or no traffic compared to the current numbers and thus will have an impact on advertising revenues, thus them not being able to pay copyright holders and then losing content.
I think The Pirate Bay guys have the right idea about selling the site and then moving on to a completely new project like The Video Bay.
This morning I came across another great torrent search engine that allows users to simply and easily search for torrents on various leading torrent sites. The site I’m talking about is Torrents.to.
Torrents.to allows users to search for torrents on various leading torrent search engines, such as Mininova, The Pirate Bay, Isohunt, BTJunkie and over 150 others.
Additionally, Torrents.to also allows you to search specific torrent sites for specific mediums, such as Jamendo for Music, GamesTorrents for games and software.
Torrents.to runs as a search toolbar at the top of the page and when you are searching for a specific item you can then view the torrent page below and also click easily between torrent sites.
Torrents.to is a great search tool to help you find your torrents quicker and easier on various leading torrent search engines. For easy of use I think that Torrents.to is a much better product than competitors such as Sumotorrent.
I thought this article was quite interesting, it came from Our Digital Music and it talks about a website called PiraBoogle.com. PiraBoogle is a quite interesting mashup of Google and PirateBay, as you can also tell from the name and logo. PiraBoogle uses Googles own in house tools to provide results on finding easy-to-use Torrent searching. Users can simply type in a song or artist and within seconds it brings back the search results on all available torrents.
The developers were quoted saying, “We thought it fun to showcase how easy it is to provide a really easy-to-use Torrent file search engine with Google’s own tools given all the recent coverage about PirateBay.org being sued and Yahoo removing PirateBay from its search results”.
Now, how does PiraBoogle differ to Seeqpod? Seeqpod is currently being sued by Warner Music, where they allege “SeeqPod directly infringes Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works, including by making on-demand and unauthorized digital public performances of those works. SeeqPod secondarily infringes Plaintiffs’ copyrights under the well-established doctrines of contributory, vicarious and inducement liability”.
