The 10 Best Torrent Meta-search Websites & Aggregators

September 04, 2008 by sharky

Public torrent sites can be broken down into two categories: torrent index sites (or torrent directories such as mininova, isohunt and thepiratebay); and torrent search-engine aggregators, more commonly known as torrent meta-search sites. A torrent meta-search will pull its results by crawling other torrent websites and indexing links that point to meta data .torrent files.

To break it down even further, some meta-search sites offer real-time results from the top torrent sites, usually shown in one page for easy browsing and statistical comparison. Others will display a less aesthetically pleasing (but often more thorough) search that’s built to mimic the Google search engine. Whichever way you prefer to conduct your torrent searching - here’s the best of the best, and why.

This is by far an exhaustive list of torrent meta-search sites. More can be found here.

ScrapeTorrent

ScrapeTorrent offers aggregated real-time searching from 9 popular torrent index sites, all displayed in a single page.

Why We Like It: Highly customizable searching. Searches can easily be filtered to show criteria according to number of seeds, size, name, and date* (’date’ filtering is great if you know your torrents - the number of ’seeds’
won’t reflect a new release, especially when . Click the "Prefs" link and you’ll be able to ’set’ your own personal options. ScrapeTorrent also features a "TV" episode search, although accurate results were met with mixed reviews.

*’Date’ filtering is appropriate when using a real-time search such as ScrapeTorrent. The default ’seed’ filtering will show the most popular torrents (that everyone is jumping on) but when filtering is done by ‘date’ for a popular release, (such as "Batman"), users can see newer similar releases such as "Propers" that trump the more popular torrents (in terms of seeders).

Why We Don’t Like It: Advertising, what else? With an Alexa rank that currently hovers around 14K, ScrapeTorrent gets plenty of traffic. Employing the ‘Adbrite’ ad campaign, you’ll be hit with the occasional full-page ad, not to mention the normal fare of ads above the search results. Fair enough - a site has to survive and hosting isn’t free. But for ScrapeTorrent to offer the removal of these ads for a "$5 donation, or more", this certainly reeks of Pay2Leech, made more deplorable when done at a P2P tier as low as public trackers. If mininova applied this approach to generate revenue, they’d be down the tubes fast (think: monova). Furthering that if you’re going to donate to BitTorrent, get your ass into a private tracker and do it where it can actually do you some good.

TorrentScan.com

TorrentScan offers a ‘frames’ based torrent searching from 15 different torrent sites in the same browser window, allowing you to search the best torrent search engines on the ‘Net from one single spot. No more hassle with finding your way onto a particular torrent site, whether you’re looking for torrent search results or looking to navigate through the site, Torrent Scan will take you directly to all in the same browser window.

What we like about it: Since each torrent site is loaded in a ‘frame’ within TorrentScan’s page, search results are not "crawled", but are entirely shown in real-time.

What we don’t: Direct torrent site comparison is impossible since only one site’s results can be shown at any given time.

PizzaTorrent.com

PizzaTorrent is a newer (2008) meta-search startup that contains 15 torrent engines in one handy (and very fast) search. Results can be browsed by category, and filtered by seeds, peers, date, name, size and engine that they’ve been pulled from. If these aren’t enough options for you, PizzaTorrent has a really great option for filtering the searches, making it easier to hone in on a specific torrent:

NowTorrents.com

NowTorrents is an advanced real-time search engine for torrents. They scan some of the largest torrent websites on the Internet and come up with the best results. NowTorrents is also able to detect and remove fake/dead torrents. Currently there’s 12 different sites that results are pulled from, including some lesser-known sites such as NewTorrents, IdealTorrent, TorrentHound & MyBitTorrent.

BitDig.com

UPDATE: Oct 6/08 - Site is now closed, and has been exposed as a scam site. A secondary sister site Torrentz.ws is also gone. Read the TorrentFreak story.

Once upon a time, BitDig stood out at as one of the best torrent meta-search sites. Hardcore BitTorrent users who do a lot of power searching need not bother visiting BitDig - this is not the site for you. The ’sources’ for searched torrents are not comparable whatsoever, and all torrent downloading must be awkwardly done from the external indexing site.

This is not to say that there’s no place for BitDig in the world of BitTorrent. BitDig offers many features that other conventional meta-search sites do not, such as the Digg-like style of voting for each torrent; ‘live’ tracker stats updating; RSS feeds per category; recently popular and visited torrents; not to mention the "live" torrent feed viewing through BitSpy.

Do not (necessarily) trust the BitDig Voting — The backbone of BitDig is based on torrent voting, à la style of Digg. We find this to be highly suspicious, even corrupt, at best. Anyone can arbitrarily ‘vote’ for a torrent (whether or not it’s a good or bad torrent), which in turn makes for a more popular torrent in terms of overall votes. Bad torrents are often at the top of the voting (hmm…) meaning that scammy torrents are routinely praised highly in an effort to get more downloaders. In the example below we searched for "Dark Knight". Out of the 5 most popular results, only one of them is a valid release, and after some further inspection of the other 4 in the list, they all turned out to be scams. Proof, indeed, that the voting scheme is not only entirely erroneous, but purposely corrupted by certain users to entice unwary DLs. (BitDig - are you reading this - one solution to this would be to employ a voting "down" system in addition to just voting "up").

Usniff.com

Usniff.com is a fast, easy to use, real-time torrent search engine that crawls 8 different torrent web pages (for now) to give you the best results for your search. The search results can be sorted by file size, torrent name, search engine, upload date, peers and seeds, and can further be filtered down to augment more exacting results.

Another cool feature about Usniff is the ability to disable engines on-the-fly before searching, without having to edit preferences or options. It should be noted that all *.torrent files are located externally on the originating torrent index site, which is then launched in another tab or instance of the browser.

PlentyOfTorrents.com

PlentyOfTorrents offers real-time searching with the original torrent indexes being launched in a frames-style environment. Simply enter a search from their main page, and use the dropdown lists to select different sites to show your results from each. Obviously this is not a service to be used for torrent comparisons; however, it’s great if you use multiple public torrent sites and want to avoid the headaches of having to open many different tabs or instances.

Aside from torrent searching, PlentyOfTorrents also Torrent Site Lists, a web proxy for anonymous browsing, torrent help & forums.

GPirate.com

GPirate.com currently boasts meta-searching that spans over more than 3 million indexed torrents (although we only noticed 4 different torrent sites in our tests - mininova, thepiratebay, sumotorrents and demonoid). All torrent links are external, which launches the originating torrent index site. Specific torrent URL links can be emailed to a friend for easy sharing. Also be sure to check out their torrent zeitgeist:

BtDig.com

BtDig at first seems like your run-of-the-mill torrent aggregator, until you discover there’s a couple of features that don’t exist anywhere else. One thing that notably stands out is the cool option to "Look up additional trackers" for a torrent. Users can then manually add these new trackers to the existing tracker list in the torrent, thus improving speed and connectability. (Note: You’ll need to copy/paste each one separately - you cannot just copy/paste the entire list of trackers).

What we like about BtDig:

  • — External torrent site browsing is not required - torrent links are handily available from the search results.
  • — Boolean operators are supported for search queries (quotes, - , !) for more accurate results.
  • — User ‘Preferences’ can be applied to customize the search engines, filters, etc.

What we don’t:

  • — There’s no way to arrange the torrents in "date" filtering, so a more precise search is required to zero in on a specific release.
  • — Only 8 torrent sites are supported. For most of the general stuff out there, this is plenty.

 

Google-Style torrent meta-searching

Speckly.com

Speckly is one of the best "Google-style" torrent searchers there is. They crawl 10 popular torrent indexers, and results can be filtered to display results by category. But what really sets Speckly apart from the rest is their "Quick Peek" feature that allows you to view real-time torrent details from the source site in a small popup window:

Other ‘Google-style’ Meta-Search

Is the Internet oversaturated with Google torrent search sites? We believe so, yes. One is enough, really. Alas, here’s a list of even more…



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