June 05, 2008 by sharky
Die-hard Azureus users know what the rest of us don’t - the best features are in the plugins. But of all the plugins that are available for Azureus, not one supports internal torrent searching. That is, until now. Introducing Cubit - the Azureus plugin for decentralized searching.
So what makes this search plugin special, when there are dozens of torrent aggregators & metasearch sites, anyways? Cubit is a system that provides fully decentralized approximate keyword search capabilities to Azureus as a standard plugin. Approximate search means that you can use Cubit to find a movie, song or artist even if you don’t know which spelling variation is used in the title or in the name. It gives you what you mean instead of what you asked for exactly, and returns the best results in the network in only a few seconds.
In layman’s terms, it means you can misspell your search query and still get correct results. Here’s an example:
How does it work?
Cubit creates alongside BitTorrent a lightweight peer-to-peer network designed from the ground up to enable rapid and accurate approximate searches. It performs the searches without relying on any centralized components, and therefore is immune to legal and technical attacks targeting torrent aggregators. Additional technical details can be found here.
We spoke with Bernard Wong, the creator of Cubit, and asked him a few questions:
FSF — I’m assuming that the Cubit search capabilities are limited to *just* the Azureus users (i.e. the ‘distributed database’) and not somehow hooked into non-Azureus or external tracker users?
Bernard — Not at all. Cubit is not tied down to only torrents in the Azureus DDB. It can link to torrents from external trackers. Much of the current content is crawled from existing torrent aggregators.
FSF — We noticed that the highest number for search results is 50. Why? Can this be changed?
Bernard — Not from the GUI unfortunately. There is nothing in the protocol that limits the number of returned results to 50. However, requesting an arbitrarily high value may bog down the network for very little gain, and we want to discourage that.
Installing Cubit
Download Cubit from here. Save it to your hard drive, and if you prefer, put it in your "C:\Program Files\Azureus" directory.
1. Open Azureus, and go to Tools > Plugins > Installation Wizard…
2. Select "By File" from the radio button, click NEXT.
3. Click "Browse" and select the file ‘Cubit-0.32.jar‘. If you moved the file to "C:/Program Files/Azureus", then the file should be listed in the default window (and you won’t have to browse for it). Click "Open" after selecting it:
4. Click "Next":
Click "Finish":
Click "Install":
5. You’ll need to allow this plugin - click "YES".
Wait for it to be installed - click "Finish" once it’s done:
That’s it! The Cubit Search Tab is now added to Azureus. Let the erroneous, misspelled torrent searching begin!
You can also verify that Cubit is installed in the Tools > Options > Plugins section:
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