Have you ever struggled to find the torrents you are looking for? This means that you have to travel to 10 different sites until you find something that vaguely looks like the right torrent! TorrentZen aims to come to your rescue. TorrentZen is a live bittorrent search engine that brings the results of some of your favourite bittorrent search engines.
TorrentZen works in the same way as other torrent tracks but instead of actually hosting pages with the results, they provide a link to those pages on other search engines. Therefore TorrentZen functions in the same basic way as a meta search engine.
Previously here on Crenk we have talked about the top torrent trackers on the web and this time I want to outline the top 5 multi-search torrent tools.
NowTorrents. Searches up to twelve sites at once. I like the file type tabs and health indicator, and they offer a Firefox and IE compatible search plugin.
uSniff. I wrote about uSniff before, and I use it quite often. I don’t really search a lot of different sites, usually just Pirate Bay and IsoHunt, and they’re both supported (along with six others). The interface is clean and responds quickly – the search box throws some people off, though. I don’t understand why, it’s giant, orange, and says “search” on it. They also have a search plugin for IE and Firefox.
ScrapeTorrent. Offers a nice preference page and searches nine sites at once. Piratebay, IsoHunt, Mininova, and Demonoid are included, and they’re my go-to sites anyways. I approve!
Speckly. I hate the way it displays results: gobs and gobs of text, Google style, and all on one page. There aren’t any sorting options, though you can at least view by file type.
Torrentz. Technically it searches multiple sites, but you’ll get a general results page first. Clicking one of the results will take you to a listing of all the individual torrents. I find it an annoying process, and don’t use Torrentz as a result.
Over at RouteNote (a free digital music distribution service) they have started to offer some of their artists live session videos via bittorrent sites. RouteNote has partned with Mininova to provide their content on the Mininova platform for all users to download for free.
At RouteNote the belief is that bittorrent clients provide a great access to millions of viewers every month. With major labels currently fighting sites like The Pirate Bay over copyright issues, it is good to see that RouteNote is adopting this technology and trying to find ways for it to help spread the word of their artists and music.
My belief is that bittorrent trackers arent going to go away any time soon, and that the technology has great benefits and sometimes you just have to think outside the box to find revenues streams. Music on the internet is currently quite a complex market and in the future I think that download sales arent going to be a key revenue stream, and more sites will appear that have advertising models such as Spotify and Imeem. The era of CDs and albums are over, artists will have to produce great tracks not albums and then promote these either as paid downloads or for mass adoption which makes money in other forms.
RouteNote downloads can be found at Mininova.
Disclosure: Im CEO of Insomnia Ltd which ownes RouteNote
Bit Torrent search engines have been in the news a lot lately. There have been always issues with sites like the Pirate Bay who find it really hard to get out of the news, and with a blog called TorrentFreak you are now able to track all this new instantly. Below are the top 5 bit torrent trackers if you are looking to get your hands on all the free music, games or movies you can get.
Isohunt.com – If you want to use this tremendous Canadian site, you better use it while you can. Note: any torrent listed as “ISOhunt release” means that it is a file verified by the administrators…a nice feature to help you get authentic torrents, not fake files.)
The Pirate Bay – by readership size, is the most popular torrent search site today. Pirate Bay also has an immense database of 600,000+ torrents, the single largest database available on the web.
Torrentspy.com – March 24, 2008: Torrentspy has voluntarily closed its doors. Instead of conforming to the American court mandates to change their privacy policies, the Torrentspy team has opted instead to cease operations. A sad day for downloaders everywhere.
Torrentscan.com – (a meta-search engine: Torrenscan is a search engine that searches other torrent search engines)
Bitsoup – Bitsoup is a growing favorite amongst P2P downloaders. As the trend towards private torrent sharing continues, you will need to signup and join as a member to participate in the Bitsoup swarm.
P.S. Mininova should probably be in the list, but I thought I would let you find new services than just the biggest.
