Today torrent engines

When I began to use BitTorrent engines in 2005 there was short question as to which indexing web engine to use. Today, Mininova is gone away and we are left with an array of various choices. This is a list of today's ten most visited BitTorrent resources according to Alexa rank.

Ten Most Used Torrent Sites:

* BTJunkie
* BitTorrent.com
* Bushtorrent & Torrentreactor (Mirror Indexes)
* Torrent Portal
* isoHunt
* The Pirate Bay
* TorrentSpy
* Torrentz


It is very interesting, because Torrent Portal has nearly double the amount of indexing files as the next leading competitor. The reason for such the total increase is that they grabber indexing private Internet zones. Keep in mind that this article is not very reliable because these sites all have different searching algorithm.


This is the best benchmark for showing which torrent web resource is doing the best indexing service. It is the most important number because no matter what policies the site may have for keeping dead torrents around it is a tell tail sign of how much is really incoming. At first I thought BTJunkie's numbers must be fake, but I assure you it is real! I tested the number posted with the number in the actual directory for the day and they matched for a week straight!


This is an overall rating based on usability interface & user choice. TorrentSpy has done a great job of increasing the speed of their site, leaving much of the work to it's developers. TorrentSpy also has fast torrent upload interface. BTJunkie has a nice option called Torrent Mail that will email the new torrents daily for any searches of your choice.

Site Review
Btjunkie.org

BTJunkie was a site that I had heard today in first time, barely made the top ten list, and it turned out to be the largest BitTorrent index. BTJunkie also indexes private torrent E-zones. I spoke with the developer who claims their success is due to having an web crawler such as Google web bot, which automatically captures torrents from thousands of web sites. The site also has an innovative feature where users can have BTJunkie search the new torrents daily and e-mail them the results. The site is fast with powerful search options and the layout is "windows" like. Overall this is my number one pick due to it's huge index of active torrents, hats off to BTJunkie!


BitTorrent.com
This torrent engine is operated by the developer of the BitTorrent protocol. The site lacks a directory service and does not store torrents directly on their servers. This is probably due to being Incorporated in the United States and trying to avoid any legal troubles. The quality of the matches returned were mediocre at best, and only provided very limited "for dummies" information. Their index seams to be based mostly off of a few major indexes included in this study. The site was offline several times during our testing period too so they loose points for uptime. I personally expected better from the "creator".


Torrentz
torrentz.com
Torrentz is similar to Bittorrent.com in that it doesn't actually store the torrents on their servers but outsources to many of the sites included in it's torrent index. This is one of the only search engines that gives you the ability to search for files within the torrents. They only index torrents that have tested active with at least one seed which makes the quality of there index the best.