What Are The Five Best Torrent Search Engines?

Topics Internet on July 25th, 2007

This list is compiled from hundreds of reader votes, and voted on each week by a small panel of torrent download users.

The criteria used to evaluate these torrent sites: breadth and depth of database, database currency, ease of use and searching, speed of access, general integrity of files, information provided about the files, information provided on the torrent P2P community, price of membership, and readers’ comments.

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, then downloading P2P files may 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.

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 the MPAA, RIAA, and other pro-artist groups. Please keep this risk in mind before you use any of the following Torrent search engines below.

Special Mention: TV Links UK (Fabulous! This site streams the latest TV episodes. That means, once you install the special DivX Web Player, you can see the latest popular television series without having to fully download them. Wait time to start watching a TV show is about 20 seconds on cable modem.)

Special Mention: ShareTV.org (ShareTV is dedicated to sharing television episodes and entire TV series. Find “24″, “Heroes”, and “Lost” episodes here. Special thanks to Chris R. for telling us about his web site.)

Special Mention: Movie and Subtitles dot Net (http://www.moviesandsubtitles.net/ is another metasearch engine that scours other torrent sites for you. Special thanks to reader Boris for this web site submission.)

Special Mention: Torrent-finder.com (Several readers from the central USA submitted this site recently. This site is gaining a bigger readership every day.)

Special mention: Mininova.org has 170,000 torrents indexed as of May, 2007. Mininova is the successor to Suprnova, one of the original big torrent databases of the Web.

1. Torrentscan.com (a meta-search engine: Torrenscan is a search engine that searches other torrent search engines)

2. Demonoid.com (Demonoid is a true reader favorite. Alas, Demonoid is membership based, and open memberships only occur one day each month. Be patient and check Demonoid every day if you wish to join. Otherwise, you will need a referring member to invite you.)

3. 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.

4. Isohunt.com (July 2007: Isohunt has over 450,000 torrents in their database. Isohunt is also being sued by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). 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.)

5. Torrentspy.com offers over 420,000 torrents in its database, one of the largest torrent indices that is readily available to the public. Enjoy it while you can.

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