For the site’s owner PizzaTorrent was mostly a fun project and a way of giving something back to the BitTorrent community. All the money that went into it came directly from the pockets of the site’s founder.

In the first few months after going live the site’s popularity started to grow up to a point where it had more than 3 million page views a month. However, as time went by the fun started to fade as well, and this eventually led to the site’s closure.

“I didn’t receive any legal threats. All the difficulties really come from other kinds of attacks,” the PizzaTorrent founder explained to TorrentFreak. He said that with the growing number of visitors, DDoS and other attacks on the site increased.

“My feeling is that the search engine was very misunderstood. Or perhaps for the many people that liked it, there were just as many people that hated it. And they decided to destroy it,” the founder of the site said.

It is not clear to him where the attacks originated from. “I don’t know if these people are connected with any anti-piracy lobby or copyright industry, or just lone snipers. But in the end the system won,” he told TorrentFreak.

To end all the trouble PizzaTorrent was closed for good earlier today. There is simply no fun in running a project where you constantly have to evade attacks from unknown ‘enemies’. The founder is considering making the code public or giving it to another suitable party, so it’s not unlikely that PizzaTorrent will reappear one way or another.

“Remember, remember the fifth of November,” the PizzaTorrent founder said, fading into one of the dark corners of the Internet.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

PizzaTorrent is a meta-search engine, inspired by the enormous success of another site we introduced last month, YouTorrent. The site has a similar look and feel as YouTorrent, but it also includes some unique features. One of the most significant differences is that it sorts the torrents by category. In the sidebar you can also click on one of the indexed sites to perform a direct search.

The search results are presented in a clean way and ordered by rank, which is the output of a formula that looks at the torrent name, keywords, date added, number of seeds and seeds vs. peers. The administrator of PizzaTorrent told TorrentFreak that his site is indeed based on the YouTorrent concept, but that he will continue to add more unique features.

Bit-Tunes

Bit-Tunes is a BitTorrent /iTunes mashup based on the popular blog platform Wordpress. The site collects information from iTunes on both the newly released and most popular albums available on the iTunes store. It fetches the album cover in high-resolution from online stores such as Amazon, and matches every album dynamically with torrent downloads available on various BitTorrent sites.

The Bit-Tunes administrator told TorrentFreak: The purpose of the site is to discover great music albums and new artists, and download music DRM-free without the need to go through the iTunes Store or own an iPod. I have a bunch more ideas of which contextual information can be added to every album (buy it on Amazon, preview / listen online), to provide an even better user experience.

LookTorrent

LookTorrent is another BitTorrent meta-search engine that was launched recently. The difference with PizzaTorrents is that search results are presented in tabs, similar to Torrent-Finder. Each tab shows the search results of one BitTorrent site, and you can select which sites you want to search. In addition, LookTorrent allows users to rate the sites and it displays search suggestions at the bottom of every results page.

ShareByte

ShareByte is different from most other search engines because it is a community driven site where users add and edit the torrents. At the moment is is still a bit low on content, but the idea might appeal to people who like to participate. All the files are categorized and links to subtitles, video trailers, IMDB ratings and more are included, or can be added by users.

In addition, the site offers some useful features to registered users, as they can add torrents to their favorites and rate the audio and video quality of the files.

As said before, BitTorrent meta-search engines can be really useful, but they are useless if all the sites they index host the same .torrent files. A bit more diversity might be a good idea, especially in the long term.

Do you know any other new BitTorrent sites that are worth visiting? Leave a comment and share it with us…

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.