NowTorrents, the fastest growing torrent site of 2009, lost 90% of its total traffic two weeks ago, being ‘penalized’ by Google. The reason for the Google penalty is unknown but the NowTorrents owner has now taken the opportunity to relaunch a new version of his search engine under a new name – TorrentFly.
A few hours ago Internet search mogul Google removed the Pirate Bay frontpage from its search results. According to the company this action was taken after it received a DMCA takedown request, which is odd since there are no torrents to be found on the homepage of The Pirate Bay.
The immensely popular BitTorrent client uTorrent recently added a Google powered torrent search engine to its website. This added search capability used Google’s custom search program and allowed visitors to search for .torrent files on Google. For reasons unknown, Google appears to be blocking the use of its search technology on the site.
uTorrent – the client of choice for most BitTorrent users – has added a Google powered torrent search engine to its website. This added search capability uses Google’s custom search program and prioritizes BitTorrent sites in the results. With millions of visitors a month, this is likely to bring in some additional revenue for BitTorrent Inc.
Hundreds of ISPs all over the world limit and restrict BitTorrent traffic on their networks. Unfortunately, most companies are not very open about their network management solutions. With a newly launched website, Google is now helping out by supporting applications that distinguish the good ISPs from the bad.
IsoHunt is one of the world’s largest BitTorrent sites. For quite a while the site has been displaying Google ads through Ask.com. Today there is controversy, as several large companies found out that their ads have been appearing on IsoHunt. Among them, Sony BMG, artist sponsor StatoilHydro and Norwegian online media store Platekompaniet.
Running a BitTorrent site can be quite costly. Most of the larger sites need over a dozen servers to keep everything running smoothly. There are some scalable alternatives for BitTorrent startups though. Two relatively unknown meta-search engines have taken a different route by using Google’s App Engine, which provides optimal scalability, for free.
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