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Ten Most Used BitTorrent Sites Compared
An anonymous reader writes that "This study was just released that compares the ten most popular BitTorrent sites. A great read if you are torn between what site to use, it has benchmark graphs and anaylsis. I was rather suprised with the findings." I hadn't heard of several of the top sites they rate. But why is it that so many torrent sites are so ugly?
I was surprised to find that legaltorrents.com is not even mentioned. Are they such a bit player? Is there a bigger, better site in that space (i.e. free/openn/cc culture)?
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
I'm not surprised - closed registration (at the moment), forum is down (no surprise there, 3rd time this year?), no sorting options whatsoever, etc... I love demonoid as well, but damn it's got it's issues.
Nope, the whole raid was apparently illegal and was done only because the white house pressured the Swedish government to do it, they might even end up getting paid restitution from their government (maybe that part's wishful thinking).
Also, here is a tracert of thepiratebay.org, it would be pretty devious of the MPAA to use this domain name (apb is a swedish copyright lobby organisation):
:)
Many of those are torrent AGGREGATORS. The difference is simply those don't host torrents, they just allow you to search through a catalog.
It's like calling Google Froogle (love the name) a store. It's not a store, it's a search engine FOR stores.
I love Torrentspy, but with out sites like the pirate bay Torrentspy would be dead, same thing for ISO hunt and many of the rest. The pirate bay is the only site on there that I know that is an actual Torrent site that hosts torrents. The rest that I know of just hosts links to torrents hosted on different servers. It's a completely different system and as such it shouldn't be compared.
Hell a posting like this is exactly what the anti-torrent community was looking for, now they can nail the top 10 torrent sites in a row (except pirate bay, I'm still doubting they will be able to take that down.)
Disclaimer: I'm developer of isoHunt.com and want to point out what's missing in your review.
1) Your reliance on claimed index size is flawed. BTJunkie's size claim looks to be non-unique torrents. To put it in perspective, isoHunt's non-unique master index is 1.7+ million torrents, while the searcheable index is the 300k+ count published (active and unique torrents).
2) A better methodology on review search engines is to sample search results, and rank by the relevance and scope of the results. You will see the search results counts to be more inline than the claimed index sizes you used for your review.
3) FYI, isoHunt indexes 7/9 other sites you reviewed, including BTJunkie.
4) It would be nice to be more specific in how you rated site features. Also, speed and relevance of search should be important factors for ranking all the sites.
5) Shameless plug: if you are talking about site features, an important one you've missed is cross-referenced trackers in all our indexed torrents. So each torrent we index is augmented by multiple trackers that would be tracking it, so you get the maximum number of peers in your torrent download. No site in your review has this ability, other than Torrentz.com (but they don't cache the torrents so you don't get any benefit for the actual download, as you get the original torrents from original sites).
Cheers,
IH
VIVA1023.com | Political Fashion.
Scrapetorrent [http://scrapetorrent.com/] provides both a web-based and a FireFox plugin search tool for scanning TorrentSpy, PirateBay, IsoHunt and MiniNova. I find it wickedly convenient.
Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there. - Will Rogers
Download more than 3 items from there and you get a "join us" blocking page. Yeah, this looks like a scam. Back to mininova and demonoid with me.