Usniff, Torrent Search Made Easy
Written by Ernesto on August 17, 2008BitTorrent’s popularity is increasing with new sites seemingly launched every day. Usniff is one such site, offering a fast real-time torrent search engine where users can search four of the most popular BitTorrent sites.
Usniff combines a great looking design with fast, real-time search results. The site currently allows users to search The Pirate Bay, Mininova, isoHunt and BitTorrent, and the search results can be sorted by file size, torrent name, search engine, upload date, peers and seeds.
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
Previously: Legal P2P Music Service Doomed to Fail
Next: Tackling College Piracy: MPAA and RIAA’s Favorite
47 Responses
And they revive…
I should try these aggregators some time…
I’d rather use Bit Che or revive the great Torrent Harvester.
looks good, will give it a whirl later to find more pr0n…lol
@2 i STILL use torrent harvester…lol
What country is it located in?
Its complete BS that you can get in trouble for LINKING to a SITE that has LINKS to a little bit of data.. these kind of sites are so far away from any type of copyrighted material its not even funny, yet they are still targets.
If you want to compare it to something.. It is not illegal to tell someone where to get drugs.
Just think of how much better the world could be if these companies actuley used there power for the good of the people.. instead of just trying to throw innocent people in jail.
I really like this site.. which surprised me alot..
keep it up usniff.. you could actualy get me to use it! (Especially when you add btmon)
Cool layout – Check
No ads – Check (I know this can change)
Good Search Results – Check
Cool admin thats not scared – Check
doin good so far.
It’s hosted in the united states.
*sigh*
Great site. But, it is awfully reminiscent of the moof.fx website located at http://moofx.mad4milk.net/.
Strike one more notch for the good guy!
sounds kool, probably not for me but you never know as it does link to the main sites i browse for rare bits of info.
Good luck to the guy(s) behind this and hope they stick to there guns when they get the legal toilet roll thrown at them.
ha ha the search result contained “one tree hill” no connection to “steal this film”
torrentz.com is quite good … it separates the good ones from axxo,fxg….. from the bad crap
looks like a complete youtorrent rip-off. If you are looking for a torrent metasearch engine, I would suggest
http://btdig.com
btdig has at least some innovations when it comes to these types of torrent sites.
@4
yeh? but tv-links.co.uk was the same principle and that was illegal apparently
only one tiny advice – lose BitTorrent search – cause it sux! :P
great search engine yay!
@4
They’re in the US.
Hope the guy is a very good hacker.
thing missing-the ability to choose wich engines to search
I use Torrentz
I prefer http://www.torrents.to
Top Search: Porn. Says it all (about teh chirldren o’ teh interwebs).
Hi:)
Big thanks to those who like&use usniff (and also to those that don’t like it that much;)). As promised, new engines and features (ability to disable sites, categorized searches etc.) will be added in late september and trough october due to lack of time at the moment. So check back in october if you really can’t live without those features ;)
Cheers,
z
No shit that site actually does look pretty good.
I’ll use it, although I’m practically married to torrentz.com.
I can’t wait for some fag to post on this forum and say some shit about how awesome he is for using private trackers and that we should use those instead because public trackers suck.
To Samo,
I’d like to suggest that you add the option to only match torrent names in the search. As is, it appears to also match filenames inside the torrent. While this feature is useful for some things, it also leads to a lot of search results that have nothing to do with what you’re looking for.
For example, try finding the TV show Level 9.
@23
This is a result of usniff searching stuff based on number of seeds. If I search based on relevancy it usually finds right stuff, but with a lot less seeds.
What I think I’ll do is let the user decide which way to do it. Default will be the way it is now, but you’ll have the option to ignore number of seeds and search based on title relevancy. Any other opinion?
I think it’s time for a blog :P
Nice advertisement. Could we have an article, please?
I didn’t been to the site yet. I am too much of a chicken to try anything new. I will wait for a week and see how things are going I hadn’t downloaded any good torrents since the µTorrent issue. Seeing most of the peers are using µTorrent v1.8 I think I will start downloading again
wonder how much it costs to place an advert like this on torrentfreak. How can this be news? yet another search engine!!
no btjunkie, lame
Come on guys we shouldn’t discourage brave people who step in to the ring.
I like it :)
Give people credit for at least DOING something for the scene as opposed to just sitting here whining that you don’t have a use for what they made specifically.
ummm
torrentz.com
been around for years…..
@22
No one needs to say it. You said it best yourself. :P
Samo, im pretty curious to how you got torrentfreak to post this “article” for you. Any chance of enlightenment?
http://www.nowtorrents.com is still the most advanced and fastest one out of all of them!
Again a nice rip-off review you guys have posted. Why give attention to sites like this?
Layout stolen from YouTorrent and clearly the design from http://moofx.mad4milk.net/
Then all the source code was stolen from the old YouTorrent.com and bit from Nowtorrents.com
Guys promoting these guys is not done!
@32 I received an email from torrentfreak if they can make an article about it.
@34 You’re right about mimicking moofx. But if you think customized javascript for filling and sorting a table is *all the source code*, think again. I also never heard for nowtorrents before.
Nice way of promoting your site BEE… *rolleyes*
Is it any better than torrentz.com? If not this is not news.
pizzatorrent.com is number one
http://www.nowsubtitles.com
I prefer Google.
Another TOTALLY USELESS piece of crap. It doesn’t do simple AND search! If I enter “Tomato and cheese” I want hits returned contain Tomato and cheese! Not a crap lot of shit which contain only tomato or cheese.
Like most of the ones before it: Utter rubbish.
Yep.. go to nowtorrents.com you wont have that problem.
http://www.nowtorrents.com/torrents/james+%2Bbond.html
james +bond will only return james and bond torrents.
james -bond will only return torrents with james but without bond.
Actually it works on usniff too…
By default it tries to search all words in query (”james AND bond”), if it doesn’t it’ll search for either james OR bond.
If you want to filter out words you can use – just as BEE posted for his site –> james -bond
For example search for james -bond -blunt will filter out both bond and blunt:
http://usniff.com/q/james+-bond+-blunt
If you’ve searched (for example) tomato cheese and you only see tomato and you’re sure there must be cheese too, try entering cheese in Filter Results :)
Btw BEE, your site is down..
OK, it’s up again.. And it seems “-” isn’t working at all… search for james -bond returns something that is missing both james and bond…
@Samo: It’s a nice start for a search engine, keep up the good work.
@BEE: Your site is a lump of fail. Oh, and I searched for “james -bond” and I got results completely unrelated? If I wanted something random I’d start bash my keyboard until there are actual comprehensible words in it.
this site is such crap.
why not search just on btjunkie & mininova. that’s it !
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