TorrentFreak’s Top 10 YouTorrent Alternatives
Written by enigmax on April 14, 2008After 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?
When we announced that YouTorrent was launching, I don’t think we expected the site to grow in popularity as quickly as it did. A month after its launch the site was pulling in 2.5 million visitors and climbing – quickly. It even caught ‘Jon’ the owner of YouTorrent off guard, although he couldn’t have been that surprised after investing a considerable $20,000 to secure the YouTorrent.com domain. The site doesn’t even have adverts to finance itself. And is now up for sale. Hmmm. Surprises all round, then – and some.
“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…
Previously: Most Popular DVDrips on BitTorrent (wk15)
Next: The Pirate Bay Demands Compensation for IFPI Block
60 Responses
Hey! First one to say yo!!!
Cheers!
Http://www.ezee.se/
Slow news day? if you’re going to put out a list of alternatives, you could at least write a little about the merits of each one, you lazy git.
One of the most pointless endeavors ever.
[quote comment="346218"]Hey! First one to say yo!!!
Cheers!
Http://www.ezee.se/[/quote]
You are a douchebag. Nobody cares if you posted first.
As said. Useless without proper trackers.
More Trackers less search! Imagine when the Pirate bay falls. All those third party sites won’t have anything to give anyway.
Not to pick on them particularly, but as an exemplar of a trend, take a look at torrent-finder.
It represents the worst of all worlds. The problem with meta-search engines has been that each site has its own idiosyncratic ways of classifying, and of responding to search requests.
For example, one site may classify “Thunderdrums” as a movie, while the next site classifies it as “Action Movie”, and the third side classifies it as “Video, Movie”. This is bad enough.
But if I search for “Blue Ball”, some sites will take that to mean “blue” and “ball”, some to mean “blue” OR “ball”, some will take quotation marks as a modifier meaning the exact phrase, and others will take the quotation marks as part of the search string (usually returning no results – d’oh!).
Torrent-finder’s approach is to do nothing, and because that doesn’t work, to present each site’s results in an individual tab, so you can see the chaos.
This is not helpful.
Youtorrent’s best feature was returning all of the results from all of the sites in a single page, although it hadn’t solved these problems. At least it didn’t obfuscate the results, or simply punt the whole problem.
I would rather search several sites one by one, than use torrent-finder to search them. At least when I do them individually, I can find out and allow for their individual quirks. Torrent–finder just confuses the issue, makes it unclear whether there were really no results for this site, or their search-expression interpretation means I need to try it a different way.
Sure, it’s a tough problem. That doesn’t give you a pass for doing nothing about it, as torrent-finder and several others, most others, did. This is principally why torrent-search sites have largely been failures.
Who needs all these sites anyway? Google roxxors, ’nuff said. :-)
I’m surprised scrape torrent isn’t in this list!
Great search engine.
[quote comment="346255"]I’m surprised scrape torrent isn’t in this list!
Great search engine.[/quote]
same for isohunt
[quote comment="346218"]Hey! First one to say yo!!!
Cheers!
Http://www.ezee.se/[/quote]
What a fuckhead.
Cheers!
[quote comment="346243"]Not to pick on them particularly, but as an exemplar of a trend, take a look at torrent-finder.
It represents the worst of all worlds. The problem with meta-search engines has been that each site has its own idiosyncratic ways of classifying, and of responding to search requests.
For example, one site may classify “Thunderdrums” as a movie, while the next site classifies it as “Action Movie”, and the third side classifies it as “Video, Movie”. This is bad enough.
But if I search for “Blue Ball”, some sites will take that to mean “blue” and “ball”, some to mean “blue” OR “ball”, some will take quotation marks as a modifier meaning the exact phrase, and others will take the quotation marks as part of the search string (usually returning no results – d’oh!).
Torrent-finder’s approach is to do nothing, and because that doesn’t work, to present each site’s results in an individual tab, so you can see the chaos.
This is not helpful.
Youtorrent’s best feature was returning all of the results from all of the sites in a single page, although it hadn’t solved these problems. At least it didn’t obfuscate the results, or simply punt the whole problem.
I would rather search several sites one by one, than use torrent-finder to search them. At least when I do them individually, I can find out and allow for their individual quirks. Torrent–finder just confuses the issue, makes it unclear whether there were really no results for this site, or their search-expression interpretation means I need to try it a different way.
Sure, it’s a tough problem. That doesn’t give you a pass for doing nothing about it, as torrent-finder and several others, most others, did. This is principally why torrent-search sites have largely been failures.[/quote]
Try pizzatorrent. Very similar in both functionality & look to the (now less than useless) youtorrent.
=]
http://www.scrapetorrent.com
[quote comment="346227"][quote comment="346218"]Hey! First one to say yo!!!
Cheers!
Http://www.ezee.se/[/quote]
You are a douchebag. Nobody cares if you posted first.[/quote]
Well you definitely do.
Torrenz.com is the best search engine, no doubt about it.
Sweet Thanks… I just heard source from TorrentFreak, mentioned on Buzz Out Loud 702…
umm btjunkie?
pizzatorrent for me :)
Slow day for news or something?
I never understood the point of indexers. Just search the trackers themselves.
wow no love for isohunt?
“I never understood the point of indexers. Just search the trackers themselves.”
Or save ten minutes…
Torrentz seems the best and scrape is a good contender.
[quote comment="346227"][quote comment="346218"]Hey! First one to say yo!!!
Cheers!
Http://www.ezee.se/[/quote]
You are a douchebag. Nobody cares if you posted first.[/quote]
Says the true _used_ douchebag…
TF.. been coming here for quite some time because of the great articles… but lately the quality has been slipping, is it just slow newsdays or….?
Plus a little bug in your software, I have not posted here in hours but I keep getting a “You are posting comments too quickly. Slow down.” error.
[quote comment="346242"]As said. Useless without proper trackers.
More Trackers less search! Imagine when the Pirate bay falls. All those third party sites won’t have anything to give anyway.[/quote]
There’s always DHT…
what about
http://www.scrapetorrent.com
I dont think isohunt and btjunky are meta search engines.
btjunkie is the best, by a country mile.
[quote comment="346343"]wow no love for isohunt?[/quote]
No.
[quote comment="346219"]Slow news day? if you’re going to put out a list of alternatives, you could at least write a little about the merits of each one, you lazy git.[/quote]
Even better, lazy asshats such as yourself can go and check out the merits of each site yourself. Or does someone have to hold your hand and wipe your ass for every little thing?
scrapetorrent ftw
Why say youtorrent while torrentz clearly is mush better.
cant beat torrentscrape or isohunt as it searches within the files, great for finding music within torrents.
New torrent-meta search engine coming soon @ http://www.seedbyte.com
Pizza torrent is down for me. Any Idea whats going on?
btjunkie.org is pretty good, in that (unlike torrentz) it creates its own torrent of all the combined sources it crawls. imho, this is an essential feature.
http://www.youtor.org.uk is good for me long live the private trackers
eeeh…www.isohun.com
just the greatest and best search engine out there, after google of course.
other search side
http://www.novotorrent.com
No mention of http://www.flixflux.co.uk? The best site for movies
btjunkie? isohunt?
any what about google bittorrent searchengine (see http://www.google.de/cse?cx=003067875025321206147%3Aclvnep3rh6k )?
i think isohunt deserves a mention, as it is essentially a meta-search engine, but actually helps the users by merging the torrents for the same file on different trackers, meaning that not only will the user then get a faster download (theoretically…more trackers = more seeds = faster speed) but also then seeds onto all the trackers aswell, which surely is good for the health of the torrent, and adds to the hydra-ification which is fairly important in my opinion
I LOVE http://www.nowtorrents.com
Its much better than youtorrent and pizzatorrent. You should have written a post about this site guys!
Thanks for all the other suggestions – we only included YouTorrent type sites in the list. BTJunkie is of course a great site, but it didn’t quite fit the criteria for a YouTorrent alternative.
We also left out a few sites which have a few too many ads.
Feel free to post more meta-search sites in the comments and thanks for the feedback
http://www.torrents.to is the more effective search engine for me as I can be sure there is no stuff that is not scraped by the meta searches because (btw torrents.to includes torrentz.com and other meta searches too).
Best
PizzaTorrent is definitely the best alternative, imo.
wheres btjunkie? thats wrong man. or maby btjunkie is so good u dont want noobs to know about it.
sorry, i see you explained there.
http://www.torrentloop.com is a meta-search engine and it works pretty good for me.
btjunkie is lovely, isohunt search engine is the worst. What I really appreciate from btjunkie is that there are ( usually useful ) comments about the torrents where isohunt or mininova users are too lazy and selfish to leave a note. When I search for a less popular title ( music or movie ) I simply type in google the keyword (title) + the word “torrent”. That’s the way ! Isohunt is the worst of all ( for searching ) I suppose even though lots of good stuff is there. viva btjunkie !
Try http://www.ontorrentz.com
I find torrents with GOOGLE
[quote comment="346294"][quote comment="346227"][quote comment="346218"]Hey! First one to say yo!!!
Cheers!
Http://www.ezee.se/[/quote]
You are a douchebag. Nobody cares if you posted first.[/quote]
Well you definitely do.[/quote]
It aggravated him. It’s not the same as caring.
[quote comment="347045"]i think isohunt deserves a mention, as it is essentially a meta-search engine, but actually helps the users by merging the torrents for the same file on different trackers, meaning that not only will the user then get a faster download (theoretically…more trackers = more seeds = faster speed) but also then seeds onto all the trackers aswell, which surely is good for the health of the torrent, and adds to the hydra-ification which is fairly important in my opinion[/quote]
It’s great. More trackers mean better transfer potential with more seeders, often needed with new and rarer content.
Bit Che anyone?
torrents.ru
No btjunkie?
Are we seriously even comparing youtorrent to btjunkie, especially since the new report-cards were implemented?
Isohunt innit. Only other site on the web besides TPB willing to take on the might of the **AA’s.
http://www.scrapetorrent.com
GREAT SEARCH ENGINE !
It’s fast and what’s important clean and uses only the best trackers. This matters a lot. Try it.
LINK: http://www.scrapetorrent.com/Search/
AN THIS ONE IS COOL TOO:
Torrent Typhon
http://torrenttyphoon.com/
can you guy help me out on five top scraping ?
its all the same ALWAYS YOU! and illegal – youtorrent, youserials, youporn you name it ;)
There’s another alternative: http://trimboo.com
Fast and clean interface.
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