Torrent’Em, a Flashy BitTorrent Search Engine
Torrent’Em is a unique BitTorrent meta-search engine because it is coded entirely in Flash, something i’ve never seen before. The site indexes several public BitTorrent sites and the search results are presented in a clean and flashy way.
Torrent’Em provides pretty much everything you expect from a meta-search engine. All the result columns are sortable, which is certainly a feature that every BitTorrent site should have. It also gives suggestions if you misspell a word.
The site is currently indexing 13 of the most popular BitTorrent sites – mininova.org, thepiratebay.org, mybittorrent.com, fenopy.com, newtorrents.info, seedpeer.com, btmon.com, torrentreactor.com, torrentportal.com, bitTorrent.am, extratorrent.com, monova.org and sumotorrent.com. More sites will be added to the list soon, says Carlos, the developer of Torrent’Em.
Torrent’Em has no ads at the moment, and the user interface looks pretty good. By default the search results are sorted by the number of seeds and peers, which is informative. More detailed information, and direct links to the source, are available when you click on one of the results form the list. “The idea is to have a fast, clean, easy to use website” Carlos told TorrentFreak.
There are also some downsides of course. Links open in a pop-up at the moment, which I find extremely annoying. The site also appears to be a bit slow, but that is mostly because of the “flashy” loading effects. Carlos told TorrentFreak that he’s working on a solution for these, and other problems, he said: “I am working on a settings panel where you can choose how to open the torrent link (self, or blank). Also, in the same panel you will be able to choose the type of animation you want and how fast you want it to be.”
Perhaps there’s even a more serious concern here, not specifically related to this meta-search engine, but to all of them. It seems that more and more sites are moving away from hosting .torrent files, let alone operate a BitTorrent tracker. Most torrents come from 2 or 3 of the bigger sites, and almost 75% of all .torrent files are tracked by The Pirate Bay.
BitTorrent meta-search engines can be really useful, but they are useless if all the sites they index host the same .torrent files. A bit more diversity might be a good idea, especially in the long term.
