The link uses the torrent hash and DHT to download content and allows for additional trackers to be added. Thus far, most BitTorrent users have ignored this alternative download method, but thanks to the Magnetiser Firefox add-on, this might change.

The idea behind the add-on is simple. It allows users of meta-search engines, such as Torrentz.com, to download a torrent’s magnet link without having to go to an external site where the torrent is hosted.

“I’ve recently written an add-on for Firefox that generates magnet links for torrent pseudo-indexers that don’t host torrents but does list them by their hashes. So far it supports Torrentz and isoHunt, but the code is simple and could be extended to any searchable indexer that shows the info hash either in the URL, or on the torrent page,” the coder of the add-on told TorrentFreak.

Once the add-on is installed, users can click the ‘magnetise’ link at the bottom right of their Firefox window when they are on a torrent detail page on Torrentz. This will launch a new window that will prompt you to pick the torrent client of your choice.

We have to say that this usage of magnet links is a great idea, and it works like a charm. Not only does it save time, it also comes in handy when a torrent is no longer available on the external site. The only downside is that the title of the download as it appears in your client will not be very descriptive.

The add-on is not available on Firefox’s add-on section just yet, but those who want to try it can download this xpi file and drag it into the Firefox browser window. After it’s installed users can add additional trackers, but since it includes the most-used trackers by default, this is not really needed.

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Flippy, the admin of Torrentz told us that he noticed some worrying changes when he checked his website late last night. There were banners from Adbrite at the top and bottom of the site, banners that didn’t belong there. It turns out that “the hacker” we mentioned before, managed to change the nameservers of the torrentz.com domain. In the middle of the new page torrentz.eu was now loading in a frame, so the site was usable apart from the extra ads.

When Flippy added some Javascript to the torrentz.eu site to prevent it from loading inside the frame, the .com domain suddenly linked to some fresh warez forum and an image hosting site. The warez forum, warez2share.com, was apparently hosted on a shared hosting account, and it didn’t take long before the account was suspended because of the traffic overload.

The hacker didn’t stop there of course, and he soon changed the page to a single Adbrite banner. And as if that wasn’t enough, he decided to email Flippy, to tell him how good of a hacker he is. “So, I emailed him back, and informed him that I have a lawyer who will subpoena Adbrite first thing in the morning, to get the account’s details,” Flippy told us.

After some emails back and forth, the hacker suddenly changed his tone. After Flippy reminded him that forging a US driver’s license is a serious crime, he suddenly became surprisingly cooperative. Instead of bragging about his hacker skills, he was suddenly willing to change the nameservers back. At the time of publication, the domain details have indeed been reverted, and until the changes clear, torrentz.com is being redirected to the backup domain, torrentz.eu.

It is not over yet though, as Flippy told us that he will do everything he can to find out the identity of the ‘hacker’, so stay tuned.

Update: The hacker is from California and forged a CA drivers license, which he can be put in jail for. Flippy, however, decided not to go after him, since it would be very costly to do from Poland, and it’s not worth it for 4 hours downtime.

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Flippy, the admin of Torrentz told TorrentFreak: “We’re not sure what happened really, but it appears that someone is trying to take over our domain, claiming his email account was hacked.” Flippy is confident that the issue will be taken care of soon, but a backup of the site is in place at torrentz.eu in case the impostor succeeds.

Earlier this year, Torrentz celebrated its 5th anniversary, which makes the site one of the longest standing in the BitTorrent sphere. Over the years, the site has evolved from a site hosting .torrent files, to one of the fastest meta-search engines, indexing millions of torrents.

It is expected that Torrentz wont suffer any downtime because of the takeover attempt, so most users wont notice anything out of the ordinary, except from the notification at the top of the website.

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

Nonetheless, during July 2003 a new BitTorrent site by the name of “Torrentz” was launched. Initially, Torrentz was hosting torrent files, the opposite of its position today. The first torrent file – “X-Files [1x01] – Pilot” – was uploaded July 24, 2003, 1:28PM, exactly 5 years ago. Although the torrent file is no longer available the site is still going strong and the visitor count is growing every day.

Torrentz went live only a week after torrentse.cx, one of the largest BitTorrent sites at the time, chose to pull the plug. Like many others, torrentse.cx decided to shut down their site after they received a warning. At the time, one of the administrators stated: “The site torrentse.cx received a cease and desist letter during the day of Wednesday, July 16, 2003 for copyright infringement. The entire website has been removed and will not return.”

Another popular BitTorrent site, bytemonsoon.com, threw in the towel around the same time. “Due to excessive bandwidth usage, lack of a stable host, consistent dos attacks, and lack of other options and as I’m leaving in 5 hours and haven’t slept yet, I have no other choice but to shut the site down,” the admin wrote. Those were turbulent times, and SuprNova.org was pretty much the only large site left. However, the sites that went down were soon replaced and these new sites were growing fast – so did Torrentz.

The screenshot below was taken in August 2003, only two weeks after the site went public. As you can see, most torrents had only a handful of peers. Now, five years later, Torrentz has over a million visitors a day, while it indexes more than 10 million pages.

Happy Birthday…

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So, let’s see how well Google does, and how their traffic estimation and ranking compares to actual traffic data and Alexa’s ranking respectively.

One of the interesting features of Google’s site comparison is that it gives an estimation of the daily traffic when you’re logged in on a Google account. The data used for the traffic statistics comes from Google analytics, consumer panels, and other third-party market research.

The traffic data seem to be quite accurate, for some sites at least. The daily (absolute) unique visitors for Mininova, for example, is estimated to be slightly above 2 million a day, which matches with real traffic stats we got from the Mininova team.

As we look at the graph below we can clearly see that Mininova is in the lead judging by the number of visitors, followed by The Pirate Bay. isoHunt and Torrentz compete for the third place. After these four sites there is a huge gap to other BitTorrent sites such as BTjunkie, TorrentReactor and TorrentPortal.

It is interesting to see how many similarities there are between Google’s ranking, and the daily reach according to Alexa.

The regional differences in popularity of the sites are also worth mentioning. The Pirate Bay, for example, is more popular than Mininova in the US, and especially in Sweden. Torrentz, on the other hand, does really well in India, while isoHunt has a relatively large fanbase in Japan.

Overall it seems that BitTorrent sites are still growing, especially The Pirate Bay, since they nearly doubled their traffic in a year. This is pretty much in line with the growth in the number of peers on The Pirate Bay trackers, which went from 5 to well over 10 million in the last 12 months.

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

One of the most interesting enhancements to the site are the verified torrents. Torrentz now marks all torrent files from trusted sources with a green checkmark. These torrent files are uploaded by known groups such as aXXo, FxM, FXG and KLAXXON for movies, and EZTV for TV-shows. This makes it easier to find out whether a file is legit or not. These verified torrents are also listed on the frontpage of Torrentz, together with the search cloud.

Another interesting feature that was recently added is the profile page for registered users. On the profile page users can check their recent activity such as comments and votes. There also is an option to change the password and email address. Flippy, the administrator of Torrentz.com told TorrentFreak that he also plans to add the most frequent searches for every individual user there.

Flippy further told us that he will add verified music torrents soon, most likely in a separate music section. And, when all the major changes are implemented he might even consider to make Torrentz compatible with Internet Explorer 6. However, the speed of the site will always have the highest priority, no matter what. When we asked him how many users Torrentz has at the moment, he told us that he had no clue, “Installing a Google Analytics tracking code will slow the site down,” he added.

For those who haven’t seen Torrentz’ updates yet, have a look, it is without a doubt the fastest BitTorrent meta-search engine.

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

Torrent’Em is not accused of infringement by the entertainment industry, but by Torrentz, a fellow meta-search engine. The site is still online at the moment, but you won’t get any results when you try to do a search.

Flippy, the admin of Torrentz noticed a lot of search requests from the same source over the past few days. He soon discovered that the requests came from Torrent’Em, who simply fetched all data they needed from his site in real-time. So, every time someone search for something on Torrent’Em, he or she actually got a reformatted search result from Torrentz, without attributing the source of the data.

Copyright infringement, nothing more, nothing less. BitTorrent sites use each others data all the time, but not like this of course, since it puts a lot of strain on the Torrentz servers. “If he asked me nicely, I would have prepared a feed for him so he could use that”, Torrentz admin Flippy told TorrentFreak, who accused Torrent’Em of copyright infringement.

Torrent’em didn’t ask anything though, and Flippy had no other option than to block all the proxies Torrent’Em is using. This pretty much takes the whole site out of business, since there are no search results to display anymore.

Carlos, the admin of Torrent’Em was not available to comment, and it is unsure whether his site will be back.

Update: Torrent’Em now links back to Torrentz who lifted the ban. And they lived happily ever after.

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As a result of the increased popularity, Torrentz had to upgrade there hardware to give the hamsters some air. The hardware upgrade turned out great and made the site faster and more reliable that ever before.

Flippy, the administrator of Torrentz told TorrentFreak: “Torrentz indexes almost 5milion pages on 16 distinct torrent sites. We don’t hot link the torrents like Torrentspy), instead we send the visitors to respectable pages. Visitors get to checkout local comments and site admins get the ad revenue they deserve. Since we get almost a million visitors daily everyone seems to be happy”.

Last month Torrentz reached a new milestone when it entered the Alexa 250. This means that they are now listed among the top 250 most visited websites on the Internet. But it probably wont stop there, of all the larger BitTorrent search engines, Torrentz has shown one of the the most stable growth patterns. And the recent server upgrades make sure it can grow even further.

Several improvements and new features have been introduced over the past year such as a comment system, private bookmarks, a cleaner layout, more torrents, and much more. But, probably the best feature of Torrentz is the lack of intrusive, most “corporations running ads are evil” anyway, according to Flippy.

We also asked Flippy if there are any upcoming features that will be included in the near future, and he said “Torrent sites have a big problem with Fake and mislabeled torrents. We will address this issue with a report system, and enhanced user control. It’s a web2.0 trend that will benefit Torrentz greatly. By the users, for the users. 2.0-toys however, eat lots of resources and the new features will have to wait for additional servers I’m afraid.”.

I think there’s a bright future ahead for Torrentz

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

Btswarm.org

Btswarm.org is a fast and clean BitTorrent site that is available in 5 different languages. The site currently indexes 107,907 torrents, which represents over 80TB of data. Btswarm supports search based RSS feeds, a great feature that every site should have in my opinion.

SumoTorrent.com

SumoTorrent who recently partnered with FileSoup, one of the oldest BitTorrent communities, collects the BitTorrent stats for our monthly stats post. But, they also serve torrents and offer not only .torrent links but also Azureus magnet links, and DHT links.

One of the things about SumoTorrent that I particularly like is that they have their own tracker, something more BitTorrent sites should do. At the moment 50% of all the torrents on public trackers are tracked by The Pirate Bay All hell would break loose if they were taken down.

FlixFlux.co.uk

FlixFlux is a BitTorrent site that focuses on movie releases. On the frontpage they list the US box office charts, DVD rental charts, and the UK box office charts. If you register you can also keep track of your favorite movies on the site. FlixFlux has a description for every film including the IMDB rating and plans to add movie trailers and for their torrents soon, which is an interesting feature.

A similar site also dedicated to movies torrents is Superfundo, they focus mainly on Scene and aXXo movie releases.

TorrentTAB.com

TorrentTAB is a new BitTorrent meta-search engine that displays the search results in a tabbed view. Personally I’m not a big fan of meta-search engines, but I know others like it. The tabbed searching works quite well. TorrentTAB site currently searches Isohunt, Mininova, Torrentz, BTjunkie, Meganova, and Torrentspy.

JunkNova.com

JunkNova is a torrent review site that keeps you up to date on all the stuff that’s available on BitTorrent, similar to sites like rlslog and hypoh. JunkNova is brought to you by the makers of TorrentScoop, a Google-powered BitTorent search engine.

MicroTor.org

The last site in our list is Microtor, a site that only indexes TV torrents. MicroTor allows you to browse through the available shows and seasons and they also have a brief plot outline for every TV show.

Do you know any new BitTorrent sites that are worth a visit? Feel free to leave a comment!

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

01.Australia
Favorite Site: Mininova

02. Romania
Favorite Site: Mininova

03. Greece
Favorite Site: Mininova

04. Netherlands
Favorite Site: Mininova

05. Canada
Favorite Site: Torrentspy

06. United Kingdom
Favorite Site: Torrentspy

07. Sweden
Favorite Site: The Pirate Bay

08. Slovakia
Favorite Site: Torrentz

09. Malaysia
Favorite Site: Mininova

10. France
Favorite Site: Mininova

–

12 Unites States
Favorite Site: Torrentspy

It is remarkable to see that there are some clear differences in the origin of the visitors among BitTorrent sites. Mininova is the most popular BitTorrent site in Australia, Torrentspy in Canada, and perhaps less surprising, The Pirate Bay rules Sweden.

The numbers below show how popular these sites are. 59 for Australia means that mininova ranks 59th in the list of most visited sites in Australia.

Mininova
59. Australia
78. Romania
78. Greece
81. France
92. Netherlands

Torrentspy
63. Canada
68. Australia
77. United Kingdom
77. Croatia
84. United Arab Emirates

The Pirate Bay
17. Sweden
34. Norway
61. Denmark
64. Finland
127. The Netherlands

Note: Alexa’s data gathering is quite dubious. The exact figures may be not be completely accurate, but it is a great tool (especially the traffic rank) to compare sites within the same niche and to get a global impression of traffic shifts over time.

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