Binary Impact

Oh BitTorrent, where would we be without you?  Now while BinaryImpact doesn’t condone illegal download, we know it happens from time to time.  So for those of you out there that enjoy torrenting like there’s no tomorrow, here are some sites that you should know about.

There as been a tremendous growth in the number of BitTorrent users and the content that is available in the past several years via BitTorrent. Nowadays it is no big deal if you can find a TV Show on BitTorrent before it has premiered on TV. The number of sites indexing and searching BitTorrent files have kept pace with this growth. Hulu has even tried to combat this by releasing several shows a week early.

THere are so many sites now that there has been a simulatious growth in the number of search engines that only search torrent files. Here are some of the top sites which every BitTorrent User must know about:

The Pirate Bay

This one almost doesn’t even need to me mentioned. Think about torrents and the first name that comes to your mind is “The Pirate Bay”. The Pirate Bay is the grand daddy of all torrent search engines and trackers. The guys are facing legal threats, they have been condemned, but they have a mission, a message, and boy do they kick some ass!

The Pirate Bay tracks the largest number of torrents. Not only they have a huge collection of torrents, TPB is also concerned about your privacy and constantly makes tracking users difficult.

They also have a sort of user Karma. There are VIP users, trusted users so that you can find out which of the users are trusted and you can download the files with ease and peace of mind.

Mininova

Like “The Pirate Bay”, Mininova tracks torrents and has a large collection of them. It is believed that if you can’t find the torrent you are looking for on either The Pirate Bay or Mininova then there is a good chance that the torrent doesn’t exist.

A peculiar fact about Mininova is that the site doesn’t index adult torrents. Moreover the site is clean and I don’t think I have seen “aggressive (as in family content)” advertisements to this day on Mininova. So if you are at work and want to search some torrents to remotely trigger downloads at your home computer, better check it out.

Vertor

Although not exactly a torrent search engine, Vertor is a nice site to have in your repertoire if you are an avid torrent user. Vertor servers constantly downloads torrents and checks them for viruses, passwords, DRM etc. The site then provides you snippets that can help you identify if the torrent actually has the content you were looking for. You will get screenshots for video files, sound previews for audio files and so on. A great way to avoid those assholes that post visuses instead of the actual file.

Demonoid

Demonoid is definately up there among the best.  However to download torrent files indexed by Demonoid, you are required to have an account. The account, although free to create, is not owned by everyone out there. The registrations are open only for some time and you require an invitation to get into Demonoid. If you manage to get an account you will see why this is one of the best.

Meta Search Engines

A meta search engine specializes in searching a number of torrent sites. You give it a query and it will search the most popular torrent sites and return you the results. Recently, there has been a flood of such meta search engines for torrents. So which one is the best? Well it comes down to personal preference, but here are some of the better ones:

Torrentz is a very popular search engine across the web. The site has a simple and clean interface. You instantly get an idea what is where and it works like a charm.

BtDig and Nowtorrents are also worth checking out. The killer features: you can sort by size, seeders, leechers and health. You can also set preferences such as which sites to search and which ones to exclude etc.

Some Specialized Torrent Search Engines

• Legal Torrents – With all the hype about BitTorrent and copyright laws, you never know what is legit and what’s not. If you want to stay out of trouble check out Legit Torrents and Legal Torrents which only list legal torrents.
• Public Domain Torrents – Lists torrents for downloading classic long forgotten movies in the Public Domain.
• Linux Distributions – Linux Tracker and TuxDistro are good for finding torrents of Linux Distributions.

This is by no means an end-all be-all list, but it should get you started on your way to filling up that 500GB hard drive you have right next to your computer. Happy torrenting!