What Are The Good Bit Torrent Search Engines? @ Love, Hope and Change

By Paul Gil, About.com

Question: What Are The Good Bit Torrent Search Engines?

"What Are The Five Best Torrent Search Engines?"

Answer: As of March 1, 2009, the 5 best bit torrent search engine sites are listed below. This list is compiled from hundreds of reader votes, and voted on each week by a small panel of torrent download users.

The criteria used to evaluate these torrent sites: breadth and depth of database, database currency, ease of use and searching, speed of access, general integrity of files, information provided about the files, information provided on the torrent P2P community, price of membership, and readers' comments.

Warning: while P2P file sharing technology is completely legal, many of the files traded through P2P are copyrighted. Unless you live in Canada where citizens are shielded from P2P copyright lawsuits, then downloading P2P files may put you at risk for a civil lawsuit in any other country. These lawsuits usually take the form of class-action suits, filed against groups of users who are logged as blatantly copying and distributing copyrighted materials. Recently, the MPAA and RIAA, along with the governments of England and Australia, took several thousand users to court, demanding that they pay thousands of dollars in copyright infringement penalties.

Your Internet Service Provider may, at their discretion, release their logs of your downloading activity to potential copyright plaintiffs. The more megabytes you download, the more you risk being sued by the MPAA, RIAA, and other pro-artist groups. Please keep this risk in mind before you use any of the following Torrent search engines below.

**Special Mention: Torrent-finder.com (Several readers from the central USA submitted this site recently. This site is gaining a bigger readership every day.)
**Special Mention: SpiralFrog.com (While not directly a torrent site, spiralfrog offers membership-only free and legal music downloads using a very special license-renewal concept.)
**Special Mention: Gpirate.com (Gpirate is getting rave reviews from several About.com readers.)
**Special mention: Mininova.org has 280,000 torrents indexed as of June, 2008. Mininova is the successor to Suprnova, one of the original big torrent databases of the Web.

The Pirate Bay, by readership size, is the most popular torrent search site today. Pirate Bay also has an immense database of 600,000+ torrents, the single largest database available on the web.
Demonoid.com is now back online! They have established themselves outside of the USA this spring 2008, and have resumed torrent operations. Demonoid is still a private community, and members are held liable for any leeching that their invited friends do in this community. If you are lucky enough to get a Demonoid membership, invite your friends carefully, lest you lose your own membership.
Isohunt.com
(In a shocking turn of the tables this September, the Isohunt webmaster is counter-suing the Canadian music industry. He is claiming that previous copyright violation suits against him were unfounded, and that he is entitled to have his legal expenses recovered. Read the entire story at www.isohunt.com)
Bitsoup Bitsoup is a growing favorite amongst P2P downloaders. As the trend towards private torrent sharing continues, you will need to signup and join as a member to participate in the Bitsoup swarm.
Torrentscan.com (a meta-search engine: Torrenscan is a search engine that searches other torrent search engines)