‘Real-Time’ BitTorrent search engines are the trend of 2008, and new sites emerge every other week. It all started in January with the launch of YouTorrent, but soon after it went legal, other sites took over. We catch up with the founder of one of YouTorrent’s successors to find out more.
BitTorrent’s popularity is increasing with new sites seemingly launched every day. Usniff is one such site, offering a fast real-time torrent search engine where users can search four of the most popular BitTorrent sites.
YouTorrent is without a doubt the most talked about newcomer in the BitTorrent scene this year. The site initially indexed all the popular torrent sites, but switched to purely ‘verified’ torrents after receiving legal threats. Today, YouTorrent officially relaunches with 67,170 “legal” torrents, good for 6 TBs of data.
YouTorrent recently restricted the number of sites it indexes, but before that, it was one of the most widely used BitTorrent meta-search engines. Due to this popularity many have copied the concept -and as of today- everyone can have their own YouTorrent clone, thanks to the free and open source “YouTorrent3″.
After YouTorrent decided that they were only interested in indexing a relatively tiny amount of licensed content from seven other sites, their links to content dropped dramatically. If the word on the BitTorrent streets is to be believed, their users are doing the same. But where will they go for their meta-searches?
In just a matter of weeks since its launch, YouTorrent has become one of the most popular BitTorrent meta-search engines. This weekend, however, it revealed a shift in strategy and it now only indexes sites that host torrent files linking to “licensed” content.
New BitTorrent sites are launched every day, but only a few stand out or have something new to offer. YouTorrent is such a new site; feature-wise it’s just a meta-search engine, but the design and user interface make it one of the best I’ve seen.
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