The Largest BitTorrent Search Engine on the Web?
Written by Ernesto on October 07, 2006A week ago several respectable sources including Digg and Slashdot reported that Btjunkie is the largest BitTorrent search site on the web. But both the methodology and the legitimacy of the source are doubtful.
The sites refer to this article, that was featured on Digg and Slashdot. The winner (according to the article) was submitted [...]
A week ago several respectable sources including Digg and Slashdot reported that Btjunkie is the largest BitTorrent search site on the web. But both the methodology and the legitimacy of the source are doubtful.
The sites refer to this article, that was featured on Digg and Slashdot. The winner (according to the article) was submitted to Digg soon after that by none other than Kevin Rose himself, the founder of , and featured on the site’s popular netcast Diggnation.
The article indeed makes it look like there’s no better BitTorrent site out there. However it is definitely not an objective comparison if you ask me. Don’t get me wrong, I like Btjunkie just as much as every other torrent site out there, but there are a couple of flaws in the report of this overly excited blogger.
The main problem lies in the reported torrent count, and whether that is a good measure for the quality of the site. The way Btjunkie indexes and collects their torrents is different from other sites. Let’s take the popular release of an episode of Prison Break:
A search for “prison break s02e06 hdtv xvid lol” returns the following results:
You can replicate these findings with several other titles, and you will see that most of the torrents on Btjunkie lists quite a lot of dupes (especially for popular torrents). They scrape a lot of sources, but the result is that there are quite a lot of identical torrents in their listings.
Besides this, different torrent sites have different removal policies. Some actively remove dead or unseeded torrents, others choose to keep them for a while. A search for Prison Break shows us 1500 torrents, but over 500 of those are dead (no seeders). It’s not that hard to reach 1 million torrents if you keep the dead ones. 42% of the torrents in Btjunkie’s TV section are not seeded. Btjunkie is not the only site with unseeded torrents, but the percentage is definitely higher compared to some sites in the top 10 list.
So quantity does not have much to do with quality here. I’m not it the position to decide who has the most unique content, but people have to keep in mind that counting all the torrents in absolutely not the best way to compare these sites because they have different inclusion policies.
Another remarkable thing about the post is the “feature rating.” Btjunkie got a 9 out of 10. Of course ratings are always a little subjective, but a 9 out of 10 is overrated if you ask me, especially for a site that lacks one of the most useful features; search based rss feeds (update, they have them but they’re hidden btjunkie.org/rss.xml?query=). You can’t live without RSS feeds if you want to broadcatch your favorite TV torrents.
But perhaps the poster was a little tired when he came to rating the features, because he apparently spent hours counting torrents.
At first I thought BTJunkie’s numbers must be fake, but I assure you it is real! I tested the number posted with the number in the actual directory for the day and they matched for a week straight!
Anyway, take a look and decide for yourself. It’s certainly not a bad site (although I don’t agree with the paid service for private torrents).
Apart from all this could one question how “legit” this article is. And I’m not the first to doubt this. In the comments of the Digg and Slashdot post people are wondering if this isn’t some kind of cheap marketing trick.
How about the fact that the “editor’s pick” is a random bt site that noone has ever heard of.
1. Make website btjunkie.com
2. Write blog ‘comparing’ it to other bt sites.
3. ???
4. Profit!// 3 is submit blog to slashdot
First of all, it is pretty strange to register a blog just to compare 10 BitTorrent sites. The same is true for the digg account that was created to digg the post from the newly created blog.
Moreover, the blogger reports to have spoken with the Btjunkie operator, while he never heard about the site before he started his research. So how did he stumble upon Btjunkie then? And has anyone even questioned the “Editor’s Choice” notes highlighted in a striking shade of red on both the index of the post and inside it?
Also interesting, a link to digg the “comparison” story was on Btjunkie’s frontpage, within a couple of minutes.
As a final note, The post claims to compare the most popular BitTorrent sites according to Alexa. However, Btjunkie is not in the Alexa top 10 of all torrent sites at all, so should not have been included in the first place…
Previously: Searching.com Flirts with BitTorrent Sites
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20 Responses
EVERY single bittorrent site advertises “LARGEST”, “BIGGEST”, “SUPERINDEX”, etc., etc. these days. (Just look at Torrentspy, PirateBay, BTMon, TorrentSearch, etc.)
Am I complaining? Absolutely not. The apparents splurge of competition between major torrent sites is a testament to the exponential growth of the scene (not an industry..yet) and further promotes healthy competition and ultimately more choices and better quality of sites for the end users.
Long live the Torrent sites! All of them! (Except you, UseNeXT.)
It’s clearly an advertisement scam, if Torrentz.com was to use the same torrent counting technique it would be well over 1,600,000 torrents by now. But wait BTjunkie also counts dead torrents. We’re talking well over 2 million torrents here.
Okay, great. So you’ve made your point. But guess what? A lot of the stuff on btj is from private transfers that don’t share their seed/peer numbers and stuff.
That’s got to make up for a substantial amount.
People that use the words “and stuff” usually don’t have much to say. The fact that BTjunkie count dead torrents is what makes their “substantial amount”.
Their crawler is also highly abusive to other servers at times.
You should’ve included isoHunt.com in the “search results” test. I found 28 instances of “prison break s02e06 hdtv xvid lol” over there. That’s somewhat closer than the 9 you found on mininova, or the 7 on torrentz.
Regards,
-HellSpawn.
http://human.nimic.org/
sadly digg.com is invaded more and more by such “featured advertisments”. thing is, that some of them aren’t as easy to expose as this …
Actually its pointless to scrape a scrape… Their practices are totally just a circle-jerk (and their the ones left eating the “pie” and the end if you know what I mean). You tell me if this makes any sense to do. mininova scrapes thepiratebay, their by all the torrents from the TRACKER thepiratebay are on the INDEX mininova. Then mybittorrent scrapes thepritatebay. finally fenopy scrapes those SAME torrents from thepiratebay, again producing another duplicate set of the SAME torrent files. Now btjunkies (or should we say jerkies) then scrapes thepiratebay, mininova, AND mybittorrent and fenopy then labels ALL 4 torrents as SEPERATE torrents with seperate stats (which makes no since as they should all have the same stats unless they are just BSing their stats. If you go on to a NORMAL index like mybittorrent, or fenopy you will see that they merge dupilcate torrents so you do not get redundant results, OR if you go to yotoshi or torrentz you will see they similarly match up the contents of the torrents to merge the duplicates rather then falsely inflating their stats to make them self look well stocked. In my opinion this will bite them in the ass when people get frustrated with all the died torrents. My guess is this is not a trustworth site which is why we dont evne bother with scraping them or indexing them… Actually I do not know any indexers or search engines who bother with their junk torrents.
but i can definitely say that btjunkie have me results for some stuff which others like torrentz, etc did not.
i found a lot of stuff there which i would not have at other regulars like mininova, tspy, etc
u must be right in what ur saying. just wanted to say that btjunkie is working for me
Each programmer know, that search query for example for words “prison break” can return different results, depending on mysql query, we at http://www.bitdig.com are using match and index, so there are results displayed not in “like” format. And also groupping by hash is very important.
Our test: prison break search query returned 244 results. maybe 20% are dead.
Screw BT Junkie, Mininova, torrentz.com and fenopy rocks
Try http://www.torrentz.com, it searches multiple sites and then lists all the results so you can load trackers from multiple websites for the same torrent. it has a lot of dead torrents, but just be smart and don’t download those ones.
it also has verified torrents so you can get past the misnamed crap.
@Tyrant: Mininova doesn’t scrap any other torrent site. All torrents on mininova are user uploaded.
I am an affiliate of BTJunkie and have been sent to bring clarity to some of the statements made by Torrentfreak and other BitTorrent site operators.
1. BTJunkie has UNIQUE TORRENTS!!!
Try uploading the same torrent twice? Try downloading a torrent from BTJunkie and uploading it. It won’t let you because our system only allows a unique combination between announce URLs and hash. This allows users to submit custom versions of announce URLs. Some people have claimed this causes our stats to be inflated, but we have taken a count of only unique hashes and we have a 98% unique database. The only time you will see these different versions of announce lists is on the most popular torrents, that is why these people that don’t understand our system come up with this conception that there are duplicates like this the whole way though, but it’s just not true. As for Flippy’s comment about torrentz being at 1.6 mil, if we counted torrents the way you thought we did we would almost be at a billion. To give Flippy a relevant comparison of BTJunkie’s database compared to his we took a count of every torrent BTJunkie has that is actively scraped with a least 1 seed: 370,753. (Torrentz has 166,000). I’m not trying to discredit your site Flippy as you have done to ours; I think you have done a great job!
2. BTJunkie DOES NOT keep dead torrents.
On September 25th btjunkie had 965,000 torrents and today (Oct. 9) it only has 975,000 torrents, if you add an average of 5,000 torrents a day I think a torrent or two is getting deleted here! We do continue to list active (scraped) torrents that don’t have any seeds because the leechers _can_ make a seed again! Why not leave the possibilities open to the users? We delete torrents when they can no longer be scraped for several days. Also, you can add “seed>0″ to your query at btjunkie and it will only show seeded torrents.
3. BTJunkie has search based RSS feeds: btjunkie.org/rss.xml?query=
Torrentfreak claims that he thought 9/10 for BTJunkie was absurd because it doesn’t have searched based RSS (one feature and your out)! Although I agree that our features are not as rich as some and this probably was a higher rating then we disserved. We have concentrated so much on our crawler that we feel we are lacking in site features, but you will start to see some great new features as we feel our crawler is almost perfected enough for now.
4. Renald is not directly affiliated with BTJunkie. Renald contacted us that he was writing a comparison and was amazed at what he had found at BTJunkie. After answering some of his questions he forwarded us a copy of what he was going to post and we decided to get right behind it! I don’t see how you would call this a “cheap marketing trick”! We would be stupid not to support it. We also thought Renald seemed like one of the most knowledgeable torrent gurus around, not just because he found our site to be the best, but because of the accuracy and knowledge he seemed to have about the BitTorrent world in general.
We noticed a great deal of smearing in the comments on both Slashdot and Digg. What’s more interesting is we found _identical_ posts that were submited to multiple comment sources! (Smear Campaign!) Do not listen to these people! They run their own sites or they are tech-savy know-it-alls that couldn’t even write a simple C program.
As a final note I would like to add that not only did the founder of Digg support our site but the founder of Slashdot (CmdrTaco) also supported the blogs findings. If you find yourself torn between who to believe, let me reliterate your two sources:
For BTJunkie: Founder of Slashdot, Founder of Digg
Against BTJunkie: Jealous BitTorrent Site Owners, Torrentfreak
I do alot of bit torrent, all audio from trade friendly bands which is perfectly legal…….Is downloading a tv show legal?
I get the bit about unseeded torrents being listed, but actually it’s a myth that there is a paid service on BTJunkie.
If you register you will see that those so called locked torrents can be accessed, but they are from different trackers. You visit the site, obtain a login and then input the details to your VIP account in BTJunkie. This means that they can list torrents downloadable only from other websites, meaning that their listings are far larger.
The only problem with this system is that even when you can get a login to these sites (and a lot of them require invitation) they tend to remove you for non-activity.
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If you’re an avid PS3 gamer, then you know the importance of saving your progress for future game play.
Pls, help me!
btjunkie have reached 2 millions torrents…
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