As a result the site’s traffic exploded and by the end of 2009 it got a well deserved entry in the list of most popular torrent sites of the year.

For 2010 KickassTorrents is planning to continue down this road by building a steady user base. The site now serves more than 500,000 searches every day and this figure is going up rapidly. On the development side the site’s operators haven’t been sitting still either.

One of the site’s newest features is a search trends section where users can browse through a listing of the 30 most searched for terms for any given day or month. Aside from the obvious habits, the feature reveals some interesting and noteworthy trends.

It might not come as a surprise that “Avatar” has been the most search for term in January and February, as it was the most popular search nearly every day. Perhaps a bit more surprising is the number two spot for the phrase “Valentines Day” yesterday, making it the 23rd most searched for phrase in February thus far.

Although “Valentines Day” might not be something you would expect the average BitTorrent user to be looking for, it does mimic this weekend’s box-office success of the film carrying the same name. Similarly, the Bollywood hit “My Name Is Khan” has been doing very well in recent days, scooping the number one spot (in the trends list) away from Avatar on Saturday.

Aside from these searches related to current events, there are also quite a few household phrases in the trends list. “French” and “Ita” for example are common search terms on most BitTorrent sites, used by French and Italians to find content in their native language. Both terms are in the top 5 nearly every day.

Other phrases are more time sensitive and only appear in the trends list on certain days of the week. TV-shows such as Heroes, Lost and 24 usually appear there a day after they air on TV, and disappear from it in the days that follow.

Interestingly, the term “aXXo” is still appearing in the top 30 list even though the notorious DVD-ripper released his latest film almost a year ago, long before KickassTorrents even existed. Old habits are hard to kick apparently.

The trends list is a useful resource for anyone interested in search trends that surface on BitTorrent and may serve as inspiration to others. It will be interesting to see how the list evolves over the months to come and how it compares to the top downloads charts we produce at the end of each year.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

On a free account, users of Google’s App Engine can host 500MB data, and serve up to 5 million page views a month. This is more than enough for a medium sized BitTorrent site. At the moment it is not possible to upgrade these limits, since paid accounts are not yet available, but this might change in the future.

Both sites are totally ad free, and great resources to search for torrents. V0rtex currently searches 12 BitTorrent sites, including established sites such as Mininova, The Pirate Bay and isoHunt. The site itself has a clean look and feel, and the search results are sortable by date, peers, seeds and more.

TorrentFreak spoke with Reda, the developer of the site, who told us that he started the project to learn how to code. “It was really fun and exciting to learn Python and Javascript/Ajax,” he said. His goal is not to compete with the big players though. Reda hasn’t even bothered to register a domain name for it since it was mainly a learning experience.

This is different for the other BitTorrent meta search engine hosted on Google’s App Engine, which does have its own domain. TorrentTab, which is a project of David Sánchez, is also using Google’s architecture to search for torrents. The site currently searches 10 sites, and presents the search results in tabs using Google Ajax Feed API.

David told TorrentFreak that he initially started the site on his own Internet connection. When the site started to attract more visitors, he had to find an alternative. Google’s App Engine seemed to be a great solution, so he recoded the site in Python and moved it over to Google’s infrastructure.

Unlike some of the other meta-search engines that use tabbed search results, TorrentTab is not merely loading the results from the other sites in a frame. Unfortunately there are no sorting options for the search results, which makes it hard to find the best seeded files, or the latest uploads.

Although V0rtex and TorrentTab are are not revolutionary in terms of features or functionality, it is great to see that Google is providing a free playground for BitTorrent startups. It’s always good to see some variety.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

In March, we mentioned both PizzaTorrent and NowTorrents in our top 10 YouTorrent (meta-search) alternatives. Since then, a lot of things have changed, both in design and feature-wise. We decided to catch up with Godius, the founder of NowTorrents, to find out what’s happened since Spring.

“We recently re-coded and designed the whole website,” Godius told us. “The new site has a more user friendly layout and has a bunch of new features. For example it’s now possible to filter site-by-site results, filter keyword and categories, all in real-time. We also build a popular searches caching system, this has greatly improved loading times. And we added more personal search preference settings.”

One of the new features at NowTorrents (and Gpirate) is the BoxOffice listings. The MPAA probably won’t be too happy with such a feature, but the users love it according to Godius.

“We are planning to expand the BoxOffice torrents feature with a latest Games and Music Albums charts section. We have noticed that users greatly appreciate the BoxOffice section, so we feel that adding games and music charts will satisfy their needs even more. Many people don’t know what to search for; they just want to download the latest stuff that has just been released.”

Godius is not too worried about the MPAA showing up at his doorstep, as he told us: “Basically we are doing exactly what Google is doing only we do not list non-torrent related results. We feel as long as Google gets away with it, and the torrent sites we link to get away with it, we have nothing to worry about.”

One of the downsides of all these new meta-torrent search engines is that they all rely on a handful of BitTorrent trackers, and sites that actually host torrent files. Running a meta-search engine is easier, less costly, and probably safer from a legal point of view. Nevertheless, they become useless if there are no torrent files to index, or torrents to track.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Despite all three sites being involved in lawsuits, they continue to attract more visitors, and thus more searches. Mininova and The Pirate Bay currently process between 7 and 8 million searches per day, roughly 230 million a month. isoHunt isn’t far behind though, as its users perform 6 million searches every day, totaling some 180 million a month.

As Slyck points out today, the larger BitTorrent sites are getting as many searches as eBay and Amazon. When combined, the three BitTorrent sites are good for half a billion searches every month, which equals half of MSN’s total search traffic (and 5% of Google’s searches). The major difference though, is that the BitTorrent sites are still growing, while Microsoft’s search engine traffic is declining.

Even though most people use BitTorrent to download TV-shows, the latest Hollywood blockbusters such as Wall-E and The Dark Knight can also be found among the most popular searches. An interesting trend worth mentioning is that more people are searching for high definition content, as ‘720p‘ is a recurring term in most site search clouds.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

TorrentFreak asked Samo, the founder of Usniff, why he started the site. “My inspiration was YouTorrent.com, before it sailed to clean waters,” he told us. “It is simple to use, responsive and has loads of good results for almost any search query. At that time I didn’t know about other similar meta-search engines, so I decided i’d try to make one myself – mostly for fun.”

The list of sites that can be searched through Usniff is currently limited to four, but Samo told us he plans to add more torrent sites in the near future. “I have not yet made a complete wish-list, but btmon.com, bitenova.nl and torrentbox.com will definitely be added in September,” he said.

Usniff does indeed have a similar look and feel as the old YouTorrent design. YouTorrent, launched in January 2008, quickly becoming the most successful new torrent site. The site initially indexed all the popular torrent sites, but switched to purely ‘verified’ torrents this April, after receiving legal threats.

Samo anticipates legal threats, but that’s not going to hold him back. “I actually do expect legal problems,” Samo told us. He thinks, however, that his site is completely legal, as it does not link to copyrighted material. “Worst case scenario is that i’ll have to move it to a server in a less strict country.”

We’ve seen a lot of new BitTorrent meta-search engines this year. Sites like this are a great resource to search multiple BitTorrent sites at once. Never forget though, that meta-search engines like this depend heavily on public trackers and sites that host the .torrent files – BitTorrent’s backbone. There aren’t too many of those left.

Usniff search results

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

And that’s all. Remember to save this text somewhere (or bookmark this) if you want to restore it later on. uTorrent will probably provide an option to disable the search box in the near future.

via

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Changes:

Bitcomet style add dialog
RSS Reader
Speed wizard to select your proper settings based on upload speed.
Multi scrape
Better download speeds from BitComet clients.

and more

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.