TorrentFreak’s Top 10 YouTorrent Alternatives

Written by enigmax on April 14, 2008 

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?

youtorrent
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

69 Responses

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26 Apr 15, 2008 at 02:44 by Clueless Wankers On Parade

[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?

27 Apr 15, 2008 at 06:13 by GBot

scrapetorrent ftw

28 Apr 15, 2008 at 08:04 by canny

Why say youtorrent while torrentz clearly is mush better.

29 Apr 15, 2008 at 09:26 by mrhappy

cant beat torrentscrape or isohunt as it searches within the files, great for finding music within torrents.

30 Apr 15, 2008 at 09:42 by Seed Byte

New torrent-meta search engine coming soon @ http://www.seedbyte.com

31 Apr 15, 2008 at 10:08 by ScruffyDan

Pizza torrent is down for me. Any Idea whats going on?

32 Apr 15, 2008 at 10:59 by asymmetric

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.

33 Apr 15, 2008 at 11:01 by walker1977

http://www.youtor.org.uk is good for me long live the private trackers

34 Apr 15, 2008 at 11:02 by traian

eeeh…www.isohun.com
just the greatest and best search engine out there, after google of course.

35 Apr 15, 2008 at 11:47 by reinamn

other search side

http://www.novotorrent.com

36 Apr 15, 2008 at 11:50 by ben

No mention of http://www.flixflux.co.uk? The best site for movies

37 Apr 15, 2008 at 12:03 by Jens

btjunkie? isohunt?
any what about google bittorrent searchengine (see http://www.google.de/cse?cx=003067875025321206147%3Aclvnep3rh6k )?

38 Apr 15, 2008 at 12:28 by azlan

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

39 Apr 15, 2008 at 12:37 by Tino

I LOVE http://www.nowtorrents.com

Its much better than youtorrent and pizzatorrent. You should have written a post about this site guys!

40 Apr 15, 2008 at 13:14 by enigmax

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

41 Apr 15, 2008 at 14:07 by Tim

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

42 Apr 15, 2008 at 15:37 by ARS-ART

PizzaTorrent is definitely the best alternative, imo.

43 Apr 15, 2008 at 15:53 by adam

wheres btjunkie? thats wrong man. or maby btjunkie is so good u dont want noobs to know about it.

44 Apr 15, 2008 at 15:58 by adam

sorry, i see you explained there.

45 Apr 15, 2008 at 17:56 by izzy

http://www.torrentloop.com is a meta-search engine and it works pretty good for me.

46 Apr 15, 2008 at 18:42 by who knows how to look will find

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 !

47 Apr 15, 2008 at 22:18 by ok

Try http://www.ontorrentz.com

48 Apr 15, 2008 at 23:09 by torrentz.com sucks

I find torrents with GOOGLE

49 Apr 16, 2008 at 07:36 by Ben Dover

[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.

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