Popular BitTorrent Search Engine Site Torrentz.eu Mysteriously Disappears (softpedia.com)

monkeyzoo writes: Softpedia reports that Torrentz.eu, the internet's biggest BitTorrent meta-search engine, has mysteriously and suddenly shut down. Visitors of the website see a simple message that reads, "Torrentz was a free, fast and powerful meta-search engine combining results from dozens of search engines." Trying to run a search, or clicking any link on the site changes that message to "Torrentz will always love you. Farewell." The main .EU domain, as well as all backup domains (.ME, .CH, and .IN), have the same message. The reason for the disappearance is mysterious, but there is speculation that Torrentz.eu admins decided to pull the plug on their own and avoid any future legal problems in the wake of increasing legal pressure on The Pirate Bay and the arrests related to KickassTorrents. It also cannot be ruled out that the site was hacked.

Comments

First Post

[Anonymous Coward]

I take it everyone else is busy trying to find another engine? What have you found?

Re:First Post

[AmiMoJo]

These days I find Google is pretty good, or DuckDuckGo if you prefer. Sometimes I use Yahoo Japan or Baidu too, because they seem to ignore American DMCA censorship requests.

On Google/DDG try filetype:magent or filetype:torrent. With the former you can often get the link you need from the result snippet without even opening the site it came from.

Re:First Post

[lucm]

Don't you find that whole torrent thing a bit labor intensive, while for $10/month you can get a gold-plated download experience on easynews?

Re:First Post

[Calydor]

It will always be September.

Re:First Post

[AmiMoJo]

I use usenet as well, but I find torrents are better for some releases. There is unfortunately quite a lot of spam on usenet. Because torrent sites usually let people vote or comment it's easier to filter out. Releases go up on torrent sites a lot faster too.

Personally I prefer Astraweb for news. Similar pricing for monthly, but I use use PAYG because I wouldn't get my money's worth from monthly.

Torrents aren't labour intensive for me anyway. I wrote a little Greasemonkey script that adds links to a popular TV calendar site that go directly to torrent sites. I need to update it now KAT and torrentz.eu are gone, so look for an update in the next few days.

Don't look at the source, BTW, I'm utterly ashamed of it.

Google is censoring TPB too

[Anonymous Coward]

Google search results for "TPB" used to take me to the latest Pirate Bay website, but now all links to TPB itself have been scrubbed and all I get are links to sites referring to TPB in a news story or something. TPB is no longer linked from Google. Bing and DuckDuckGo still work properly though. This only happened in the last week. I think something is up.

Re:is torrent still a thing?

[Aaron B Lingwood]

Torrents are not supported by my VPN provider, streaming sites are.

That is more an indictment of the shortcomings of the VPN provider you chose.

Streaming is a 1:Many relationship which is prohibitively costly. For media: This may be subsidized by advertising, tracking, or malware. A 'capture' of a stream will not yield a unique hash so services such as cover art scrapers and subtitle-downloaders will yield non-optimal results. The file is also unlikely to be compressed in a way that maximizes quality while efficiently using disc space and processing power. For applications/OSes: This can become unsustainable for a small company or result in overloaded and slow servers for a large company (ie: ASUS).

Torrents allow for leeching (Many:1) and seeding (Many:Many) which takes the burden off the host, allows redundancy, and achieves far greater speeds than having a single point from which to obtain the files.

Re:That is impossible.

[lucm]

Something just does not become impossible. if something impossible does exist then you'd be able to see it.. if somebody for example made something impossible it actually is not impossible because it had succeeded via the person's own intent. but if that person had covered up the intent well that is still not impossible because we already know something impossible cannot exist.

"His weapon flails wildly at any or all targets, the truth. his theory placed with humble intentions cannot be understood until someone proves him wrong"

What in the fuck is wrong with you?

Those are actually lyrics from a Ke$ha song.