open air review

As of September 27, 2007, the most popular Bit Torrent search engine sites are listed below. This list is selected from hundreds of reader email suggestions, and is updated weekly. You are welcome to submit your suggestions for inclusion into this list.

This list is in random order. Special thanks to the many About.com readers who help keep this list current via their email submissions.

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.

1. Demonoid Sep. 26, 2007 update: Demonoid.com is now offline. Details are forthcoming, but the rumor is that their Canadian ISP shut them down by court order. Fears are that the Canadian Recording Industry Association is behind this sudden shutdown.

2. Torrentportal.com

3. Torrentmatrix.com

4. Torrentspy.com September 2007 update: Torrentspy has declared that it will be forbidding American users from doing searches on its website, under pressure from the MPAA.

5. Isohunt.com
   September, 2007: Isohunt is barring American users from connecting to American torrent trackers. American users, however, can still use Isohunt to find torrents, and connect to third party trackers.
   July, 2007: Isohunt has over 450,000 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.

6. Torrentscan.com (a “meta-search” engine, which is a search engine that searches other search engines)

7. Snarf It! (born from previous Suprnova influences)

8. LegalTorrents.com (As the name implies, this is a database of public-domain content. Thanks to Anand S. for this URL.)

9. Scrapetorrent.com is another torrent meta-search engine that is gaining popularity.

10. Mininova.org has 190,000 torrents indexed as of April, 2007. Mininova is the successor to Suprnova, one of the original big torrent databases of the Web.

11. 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.)

12. Torrentz.com (special thanks to reader, Jonathan R., for this link)

13. Torrents.to

14. 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.

15. BTjunkie

16. 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)

17. The Pirate Bay (Pirate Bay, by readership size, is the most popular torrent search site today. Pirate Bay has an immense database of 600,000+ torrents, the largest database at this time.)
    (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!)

18. ByTorrents Meta Search

19. Thinktorrent.com

20. FileList.org
21. Yotoshi.com
22. Meganova.org
23. FileMP3.org
24. TorrentBytes.net
25. Torrent-damage.net
26. FullDLS.com
27. TopTorrents (has been down intermittently the last few weeks for unknown reasons.)
28. Torrentlocomotive (special thanks to Juan C for the for this submission)
29. BiteNova (formerly known as “Bi-Torrents”, BiteNova is a free Torrent site with a spartan look and fast searching format.)
30. bittorrent.com (the official Torrent website by Bram Cohen, the designer of the Python BitTorrent format.)
31. Fenopy (formerly Bitoogle.com) (the ‘original’ bittorrent search engine, which has now morphed into a metasearch engine. The results from your Bitoogle searches will point to various other torrent search sites. This site has been redirected recently.)
32. BTbot.com (this site has been intimidated into listing fewer and fewer current torrents. The administrator was likely spooked by the recent wave of lawsuits against Isohunt and Pirate Bay)
33. Special mention: Torrents.co.uk (This British site has been slow to load lately)
34. Special mention: LokiTorrent.com (In a precedent-setting MPAA civil law suit, Loki has been shut down by court order as of Feb 10, 2005. To add insult to injury, the MPAA has left a trashy saber-rattling message at the lokitorrent home page in an attempt to intimidate other P2P users. P2P users everywhere are mourning the loss of this excellent service, and the MPAA is estranging even more Internet users with its heavy-handed campaign.)
35. Special mention: Commonbits.com (This new beta search site is dedicated to media on progressive political content: audio, video, photos, reports, transcripts and other files. This is a place for activists to share their message, and for people to learn about other political choices.)

If you don’t like torrents try MP3 Fiesta. They hold nearly 67,000 albums from nearly 17,000 artists. Prices are around the $0.10 mark for single tracks with full albums coming in at roughly $1.00. Tracks are available from 192kbps and they take major credit cards and PayPal

The Most Popular Bit Torrent P2P Software

Here they are: the most popular ‘Music Pirate’ downloading software for torrent file sharing. This list is compiled from hundreds of user comments and reader suggestions.

1. uTorrent
   (Known as both “u-torrent” and “micro torrent”, this is the most popular torrent tool today. uTorrent has all the functions a torrent downloader will ever need, and it only requires 1 MB of hard drive space and memory. uTorrent has all the downloading and seeding performance of its competitors, but with minimal impact to the rest of your computer’s speed.)
2. BitComet
   (Good, but losing popularity to uTorrent)
3. ABC
   (Another very popular Torrent client)
4. BitLord
   (A popular tool that has a built-in torrent search engine…you may never need to use a torrent search web site ever again with this product)
5. TurboBT
   (Nice-looking GUI appearance with this package)
6. Azureus
   (A Java language client; was considered “king” of the torrent programs until uTorrent software came along and took that crown away. As with uTorrent and any other software you install, ensure that you virus scan.)
7. The Original BitTorrent Client
   (Authored by Bram Cohen himself; no fancy GUI here, but it downloads quickly. Recommended for programmer types and Macintosh users)

Another 10 Amazing Torrent Sites

1. Torrentz

Alexa Rank: 1492

2. Mininova

Alexa Rank: 290

3. ThePirateBay

Alexa Rank: 427

4. Torrentspy

Alexa Rank: 470

5. Isohunt

Alexa Rank: 720

6. Meganova

Alexa Rank: 8970

7. Bitenova

Alexa Rank: 11558

8. BitTorrent

Alexa Rank: 1468

9. Torrentbox

Alexa Rank: 4360

10. TorrentReactor

Alexa Rank: 9103

10.1 Fenopy

10.2 SumoTorrent

10.3 Snarf-It

10.4 www.teletorrents.org

Warning: while P2P file sharing technology is completely legal, many of the files traded through P2P are copyrighted. Unless you live in Canada where citizens are shielded from P2P copyright lawsuits, downloading music, movie, and TV files will put you at risk for a civil lawsuit in any other country. These lawsuits usually take the form of class-action suits, filed against groups of users who are logged as blatantly copying and distributing copyrighted materials. Recently, the MPAA and RIAA, along with the governments of England and Australia, took several thousand users to court, demanding that they pay thousands of dollars in copyright infringement penalties. Please keep this lawsuit risk in mind when you install and use any BitTorrent software in the USA, Europe, or Asia.