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.

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.

Unfortunately this astronomical growth didn’t last. In April the meta-search engine stopped indexing sites like The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, and other sources that provide links to unauthorized copyrighted files. They even considered selling the site at the time, but this never went though. Unsurprisingly, this change cost the site most of its visitors, who moved on to YouTorrent alternatives.

After a while however, the traffic stabilized, and a few weeks later it started to grow again. Today, four months after this drastic change, YouTorrent is ready to move on, as it launches the largest legal torrent search engine with tens of thousands of torrents adding up to a whopping 6TB of data.

“We feel that a full meta-search engine is a better experience for our users considering our switch to legal content,” Patrick, the co-founder of YouTorrent said. “We now return accurate seed and peer data and results are quick and easy to navigate, and more in line with traditional search engine result pages.”

The new site searches verified torrents on sites such as Jamendo, Vuze, BitTorrent, Legaltorrents, Legittorrents, Gameupdates, Wortharchiving, BT.etree and Mininova’s featured torrents section. By default the results are ordered by relevance, but they can also be sorted by number of seeds and peers, the size of the torrent, the upload dates and the number of total downloads so far.

For music files, YouTorrent has also included a link to the Bitlet streaming tool, so users can preview tracks before they decide whether or not they want to download them. Similar to the old design, there is a list of related searches in the sidebar, which may serve as inspiration. The YouTorrent blog has been updated, and has some great content as well.

Patrick further told us that they are currently working on a content distribution platform. This will allow individual publishers to upload files to the site, and YouTorrent will make sure that the files are seeded. The content distribution platform will be similar to Mininova’s CD, but Patrick assured us that it will include some great features that are unique to YouTorrent.

“Although we have lost some traffic we are still very popular and serving hundreds of thousands of searches a day,” Patrick said. “This is very encouraging and we believe with the new service this will continue to grow as our content aggregation reach and depth increases.”

Going legal has cost the site more than half of its traffic. The new interface and several other updates are aiming to get at least some of these visitors back, and make the site one of the big players in the “legal” torrent niche. Time will tell if they have made the right decision.

YouTorrent’s New Look

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

When we announced that YouTorrent was launching, we did not expected the site to grow in popularity as quickly as it did. Only a month after its launch the site was pulling in 2.5 million visitors and climbing – quickly. In fact, YouTorrent became so popular that the site made it into the top 25 most visited BitTorrent sites only 2 months after its launch.

Unsurprisingly, other webmasters soon cloned the YouTorrent concept, and within a few weeks PizzaTorrent and NowTorrents saw the light, and even more clones followed. One of these clones is special though, as the code it offers is open source and available for free. The open source YouTorrent clone is named YouTorrent3 and has the same look and feel as the site it’s based on.

“In less than 1 minute you can have your own YouTorrent clone,” YouTorrent3 developer Aleksander told TorrentFreak. He explained that he decided to code it because he noticed that there was a growing interest for open source and easy to use YouTorrent clones.

It is extremely simple indeed, all you need to do is upload the files to your webserver and you’re good to go. It works fine, but the code can still be improved on, as Aleksander notes: “Don’t forget that work is coded in 1 hour, so don’t wonder why some code is strange or looks lame.”

At the moment only the frontend is available for download so people don’t need to install a database, and they can have their own YouTorrent clone online in a few seconds. Aleksander is still tweaking the backend to improve the caching system and make the database compatible with different SQL servers. The backend will be made public in a few weeks.

The source and instructions on how to get it working are available over here.

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

“My goal is to be in the top 100 most-visited sites on the Internet in two years,” ‘Jon’ told BusinessWeek. “If I can corner the torrent market, everyone would rely on the site for profits, just as people look to Google for search-based advertising revenue.”

Yesterday, Patrick from YouTorrent told us: “The YouTorrent project has grown very quickly and unfortunately is not in line with the owning company’s core business.”

Unfortunately, the chances of becoming the BitTorrent equivalent of Google have evaporated. Having courted the file-sharing masses and gained huge amounts of free publicity as a result, the site is only now of interest to a tiny subset of them and it appears that for many, the site will never be useful again. So having just lost 99% of its original target market, it won’t be as much use to advertisers either. Wait….the site doesn’t have any ads……

This is getting confusing. Back to the matter in hand.

Top 10 YouTorrent (meta-search) Alternatives

1. PizzaTorrent

PizzaTorrent was the first YouTorrent clone, so it deserves to be top of the list.

2. NowTorrents

Another YouTorrent clone.

3. Torrentz

Fast, clean and reliable. Probably the best meta-search engine out there.

4. LookTorrent

A relatively new meta-search engine that presents search results in separate tabs

5. Torrents.to

Torrent.to uses a toolbar at the top of the page to search several BitTorrent sites.

6. Morrent

A meta-search engine with categories and advanced search operators.

7. Torrent-Finder

Searched more that 100 private and public BitTorrent sites, the results open in separate tabs.

8. TorrentScan

TorrentScan allows you to search 13 BitTorrent sites from one page.

9. BitDig

This could be a great site if they decided to got rid of the excessive advertising.

10. TorrentScoop

A meta serach engine powered by the Google coop service.

BitTorrent meta-search engines can be a great and easy way to find torrents. However, they are useless if all the sites they index host the same .torrent files. So, no matter how useful these site may seem, they are pretty much useless if there are no trackers.

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

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

YouTorrent’s selling points are the great interface, an ad-less design, and its ability to search most of the bigger BitTorrent sites. The latter has changed though, and this might very well be the end of YouTorrent’s popularity.

Patrick, one of the people running YouTorrent told TorrentFreak: “Due to the uncertain nature of the source and accuracy of the results returned by some engines, we have decided to reduce our engine selection to ones that claim the provision of licensed, certified content.”

It doesn’t stop there. YouTorrent is not only going ‘legal’, but Patrick is also looking into selling the site. “The YouTorrent project has grown very quickly and unfortunately is not in line with the owning companies core business,” Patrick said.

“We have had some interest [to buy] from some parties. On that basis, we have presented the site to other parties in the space to see if there is interest there also,” he added.

It is unfortunate to see that YouTorrent has to throw in the towel only 4 months after it launched. One thing is clear, they haven’t made any money so far, since there weren’t any ads on the site. Selling the site could make the YouTorrent team quite a few bucks though, it almost looks like this was the plan anyway.

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

This list of BitTorrent sites is not extensive, but it covers the three most popular torrent sites. A search for the recently released second part of Steal This Film returns quite a few results which are presented in a clean way. By default the results are ordered by popularity (seeds/peers), but they can be further sorted by date, size, and search engine.

If you can’t find what you were looking for you have the option to check for related and popular searches in the sidebar. At the moment the site has no ads and is pretty fast, but that might change in the future. Overall, for people who like meta search engines, I think that YouTorrent is worth a visit.

More useful BitTorrent sites can be found in our roundup of the 10 most popular BitTorrent sites of 2007. Do you know any other BitTorrent sites with some innovative features that we haven’t covered yet here at TorrentFreak? Let us know and leave a comment.

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