Ten Most Used BitTorrent Sites Compared

An anonymous reader writes that "This study was just released that compares the ten most popular BitTorrent sites. A great read if you are torn between what site to use, it has benchmark graphs and anaylsis. I was rather suprised with the findings." I hadn't heard of several of the top sites they rate. But why is it that so many torrent sites are so ugly?

Ugly? In What Way?

I hadn't heard of several of the top sites they rate. But why is it that so many torrent sites are so ugly?

Excellent question! But a difficult one to answer because, if cheesy TV has taught me anything, isn't beauty in the eye of the beholder?

I've never taken a UI design course. And I'm probably the last person on earth to be able to make one. I'm an engineer developer and my web services often have no front end. If they do, it is one of ice cold ability to do what you want -- the perfect marriage of function and function.

So what about these sites displeases you? I just flipped through four of them and none of them made my eyes puke like an angry fruit salad (although BushTorrent did cause me to cringe at the site of my 'fearless leader') ... so what in particular is the problem?

Hell, I even visited Torrentz and, although the 90s called and asked for their 'z' back, the design was still pleasing to me. I went to isoHunt that was minimalist but still did the job. I went to MegaNova and even though it was busy as hell, it had the top torrents laid out by category. So what's the problem? There are a few flaws here and there but these sites serve the function they are there to perform. The only really ugly things on these sites are the ads. So far I've seen one flashing ad and one shaking ad. Those are offensive to my eye but I'm so use to ignoring them! I mean, the people who run these indexing sites probably don't get revenue from anything but ads so to make their pages load faster, they inundate us with banners and Ads By Google. So what? So does Slashdot and I'm here quite often. It's the 00s, most sites would put ads by Google on their own grandmother if she was digital.

I don't see any problems with these UIs. They're not award winning, but then again, should they be? I mean, the few times I've used bittorrent is because a site wants to host a large file illegally (like a WoW patch or whatever) and they instead offer a torrent file. I'm really interested in what everyone else is interested in and, if you are, then just go to these sites and peruse them. Don't make them your homepage.

If you really think they're that horrible, wander back to Geocities user pages and enjoy dancing Jesus and Flying Toasters with the blink marquee tag abused to high hell. Then you'd be overjoyed to see some of the gradient blends used on these pages.

From the quote at the bottom of /. as I read this:

There's something the technicians need to learn from the artists. If it isn't aesthetically pleasing, it's probably wrong.

Re:From the quote at the bottom of /. as I read th

There's something the technicians need to learn from the artists. If it isn't aesthetically pleasing, it's probably wrong.

How hilariously coincidental. And although it may be the quote of the moment, I must counter with something I've said to many people: Stephen Hawking isn't very aesthetically pleasing but he's rarely wrong.

Or, conventionally cited as "you can't judge a book by its cover."

What it means is that I've seen some very ugly things create or provide very beautiful things. Elliott Smith was ugly but his music was beautiful. Although the library I went to as a kid was ugly and looked like an old bomb shelter, it provided something very important to me. Although snakes and earth worms and spiders look ugly as hell, I still love what they do. And, as a kid, it made sense to me to kill rabbits and pocket gophers on a farm while making sure not to harm a garden snake as I mowed the lawn.

Like I'll still maintain, whether something is beautiful or ugly tells me nothing.

Re:From the quote at the bottom of /. as I read th

You can write very beautiful code and yet have an interface as ugly as sin... likewise, you can have horrible spaghetti code lying behind a very pretty GUI.

Besides, isn't it good design to keep the interface of your program slightly ugly, whilst maintaining a logical and flowing design, as to avoid distracting the user from what they're trying to do? Flowers and curves and ponies are all well and good, but they don't necessarily make for an easy to use interface.

Thanks

But why is it that so many torrent sites are so ugly?

... good question, but you ask it then point us to a page with acres of exposed lime green background...

Function not form.

No one really cares what the site looks like when they're trying to grab their 0-day moviez.

Another function

I was surprised to find that legaltorrents.com is not even mentioned. Are they such a bit player? Is there a bigger, better site in that space (i.e. free/openn/cc culture)?

The original BT.com

The editor basically slags it off for a number of (valid) reasons, and finishes by saying "I personally expected better from the "creator"."

Fair enough, but why the quotation marks? Is that meant to be a dig at Brah's "supposed" claim to have created it? Be fair, the guy created something that revolutionised the internet as a medium for media. I don't think he deserves that kind of attitude for not doing as great a job at implementing the service as he did with the software.

Re:The original BT.com

Apparently he thinks that BT was created in order for him to get warez and movies faster, and that "the creator" is somehow failing in his responsibilities by not facilitating this. Which is silly as the creator has always maintained that he developed BT as just a transport mechanism and tried to distance himself from "the scene" whenever given the chance.

Which of these

Which of these top 10 sites focus on non-copyrighted material? You know, the stuff that the torrent fans bring up as the reason they use bittorrent?

Re:Which of these

There's always Legaltorrents.com [legaltorrents.com], started by Simon Carless!

please note that all of the current torrents are made available under a Creative Commons license with the full permission of the rights holder.

The best Torrent sites are private...

Honestly the best torrent sites are the semi-private ones. There are quite a few non-public bit torrent sites that are very easy to get into but are not directly available to anyone who goes to their web page.

I find that public BT sites are too slow becuase nobody cares to share much.

Re:The best Torrent sites are private...

Meanwhile, why isn't demonoid in this list? I can almost always find what I want there...

10 most popular

Are the ones with the best warez, pr0n and movies. Who gives a crap about looks?

Public trackers suck

There are lots (quasi-)private trackers, which not only have as many torrents listed as the sites mentioned in the article, but also provide a lot more quality (in download speed) because of the involved ratio system (demon**** is a good example of this). And there are some very hot 0-day trackers which, even though they only track torrents for 1000 hours, are very popular among many people (such as the file* sites).

Bittorrent-users aren't considered 1337 in general, but they can be 1337er than the ones who use the sites in this article :)

Shhhhhhhh!

Don't tell the RIAA.

TFA's conclusion:

... btjunkie.org

However, I'm not sure I can trust anything this 'review' says. For example, by the numbers btjunkie.org seems incredibly more successful than any of its competition, which seems a bit odd given that it doesn't seem that well-known (53,000 hits on Google; compare to mininova, which has 3,000,000). TFA says:

"At first I thought BTJunkie's numbers must be fake, but I assure you it is real! I tested the number posted with the number in the actual directory for the day and they matched for a week straight!"

Yes, I am sure that you did, and I am also sure that you don't own btjunkie.org. 100% sure.

Re:TFA's conclusion:

On a related note, I was under the impression that the Pirate Bay had been taken down and was now being closely monitored and downloading from them was essentially flagging yourself.

Nope, the whole raid was apparently illegal and was done only because the white house pressured the Swedish government to do it, they might even end up getting paid restitution from their government (maybe that part's wishful thinking).

Also, here is a tracert of thepiratebay.org, it would be pretty devious of the MPAA to use this domain name (apb [wikipedia.org] is a swedish copyright lobby organisation):

Tracing route to piratebay.org [83.140.176.146] over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms 192.168.0.1

2 1 ms 2 ms 3 ms 192.168.1.62

.
.
.

9 18 ms 18 ms 18 ms netnod-ix-ge-a-sth-4470.port80.se [195.245.240.143]

10 19 ms 19 ms 18 ms hey.mpaa.and.apb.bite.my.shiny.metal.ass.thepirate bay.org [83.140.176.146]

:)

MPAA and RIIA

How much you wanna bet the MPAA and RIIA are also reading this article. Thanks guys. Not only do you independently show which sites engage in copyright enfringement but also how much each site does that (on a daily basis no less)

I personally still like The Pirate Bay

It's one of those things you just get used to doing, and it's hard to move on to something else.

I actually started using Torrentz a while ago, but I couldn't get used to it's interface.

It's like when AltaVista was THE search engine and then came along Google. It took me some time until I really abandoned AltaVista.

Demonoid

Iam surprised they didnt write about the Big daddy torrent tracker site Demonoid.com

Comparison Criteria

The sites are compared by number of torrents, new torrents per day and "site features". This does not reflect a site's usability at all! What is importent is the average seeder/leecher quota and the availability + quality of "fresh" material. Those are obviously much harder to measure.

For example, BTJunkie is "Editor's Choice" because it lists the most torrents, including "private" ones they find using a Google-likc web crawler. This means lots of available content, but can you guess how much junk/old/inactive torrents you will find there? I think you have to test the sites yourself to find what suits your requirements best. Still, good list of the "bigger" torrent sites there.

"So many torrents sites are so ugly!"

I can see the new communications strategy of the RIAA and MPAA:

"Not only are you a thief for downloading music and movies, downloading makes you gay!"

user comments

The only thing a torrent site really needs is a user comment section. If the quality is bad you'll read about it before you download like 1.4G of data and waste your time.

I think all these sites are pretty good in their way and to mark them down as 'ugly' doesn't make much sense.

If someone made one using Flash would it be any better? The answer is no (and I develop flash sites too).

bt junkie . . .

. . . has been slashdotted. So get off it slashdotters, it's my site and I need it. ;-)

isoHunt / Mininova

In my opinion the best site for new releases is isoHunt [isohunt.com]. There are no fake files on isoHunt and isoHunt torrents usually have many reliable trackers cross-referenced from BitTorrent sites across the internet.

For older files Mininova [mininova.org] is the best. It has almost 150000 files. Everyone can upload, but there are good moderators who remove fake files. The site has a very fast, CSS-based layout without HTML tables.

I don't use private sites, because it's very hard to have a high ratio on those sites if you don't download 0-day releases. On public sites I have a 1.0-1.1 ratio after 3 hours of seeding. It's impossible on private sites because there are 8 times more seeders than leechers.

Succeeding Like Success

The beauty of the BT protocol is that greater popularity means faster downloads, due to more simultaneous sources of content. So I'd expect there to eventually result just the biggest BT network, attracting everyone from slower, smaller networks. Like eBay, or any other increasingly "perfect capital market".

And I'd expect the content available to eventually "diffuse" across these networks, equalizing in availability on all of them, especially the largest.

But BT is now several years old, with many global users, and there are still lots of little networks and very different content available. What's working against those basic borg trends?

Ten most used bittorrent

Ten most used bittorrent
BTJunkie
BitTorrent.com
Bushtorrent & Torrentreactor
isoHunt
Meganova
Mininova
The Pirate Bay
Torrent Portal
TorrentSpy
Torrentz

more cool torrent sites

I use www.demoniod.com alot, however this is an invite only member site. I also use www.torrentscan.com which is a search pages that search all the popular sites inculding many on the top 10.

popular?

I could be dead wrong here, but isn't popularity rated as in 'people that use it'? giving us raw numbers like what it looks like, how many torrents are hosted and how many more it can sponge of the web isn't telling me that... it just tells me how big they are.. relativly speaking He tells us why it could be popular, not if it is, he fails the headline..

Pot calling the Kettle Black

Seriously. Slashdot calling something ugly? That is totally the Pot calling the kettle black.

Most torrent sites seem to be designed with two things in mind. Functionality and Ads. That's it.

Too bad most of those arn't torrent sites.

Many of those are torrent AGGREGATORS. The difference is simply those don't host torrents, they just allow you to search through a catalog.

It's like calling Google Froogle (love the name) a store. It's not a store, it's a search engine FOR stores.

I love Torrentspy, but with out sites like the pirate bay Torrentspy would be dead, same thing for ISO hunt and many of the rest. The pirate bay is the only site on there that I know that is an actual Torrent site that hosts torrents. The rest that I know of just hosts links to torrents hosted on different servers. It's a completely different system and as such it shouldn't be compared.

Hell a posting like this is exactly what the anti-torrent community was looking for, now they can nail the top 10 torrent sites in a row (except pirate bay, I'm still doubting they will be able to take that down.)

Torrentspy.com changed their download links...

I really liked on Torrentspy how you could just click the little download icon next to the torrent listing and bypass having to go in to the torrent data page and clicking the download link. They took that away like a year ago and I want it back. :)

The problem is that Firefox won't save place on the page when you click the back button (on Torrentspy anyway) and so you end up having to open up a new tab/page just to go in and click download. That sucks!

Sorry, I've been wanting to bitch about this for a year and now I can. So there...

I was even contemplating writing a small Firefox extension to do just that, but I only know Perl/PHP/Bash Oh well. :)

A random Blog?

First off, I dont think size of the index is a good measure of quality as many torrents can be low-quality with no seeds or simply dead.

Also doesnt the fact that this 'study' is just some blog post give pause to the editors?

How about the fact that the "editor's pick" is a random bt site that noone has ever heard of.

1. Make website btjunkie.com
2. Write blog 'comparing' it to other bt sites.
3. ???
4. Profit!

// 3 is submit blog to slashdot

Reputable

I find it hard to believe that this is a reputable source when they abbreviate "The Pirate Bay" as TBP!

Anyone using PirateBay's Relakks darknet?

While we're at the subject of torrent sites, does anyone have experience with the new Relakks service [slashdot.org] from PirateBay?

All of them..

Have illegal content.

Why is Slashdot encouraging piracy?

Why are the sites ugly?

Well, you know the sexist old joke about ugly women. This is just the opposite side of the coin: when you deliver quality goods, you don't have to include the latest aesthetic fads.

Best site for torrents, hands down

www.torrentscan.com searches every site you want. I find it very useful.

What about RSS Feeds?

How can you possibly compare all the major torrent sites without reviewing their RSS feeds? These days RSS feeds are essential to automate television downloading (broadcatching), and I can't believe they didn't even bother to mention them.

The two most popular browsers (Azureus and uTorrent) both support RSS feeds. However with uTorrent you may have to filter your feeds through RSSatellite in order for feeds from mininova, torrentspy, and some others to work properly.

Pirate Bay slam?

"Famous for their blatant disregard for intellectual property rights,"

Um, last time i heard what are doing is legal in their country, so tell me again what hey are 'blantly disregarding'?

Or is it ok to judge others based on your concept of right and wrong?

I'm developer of isoHunt.com, study is flawed

Disclaimer: I'm developer of isoHunt.com and want to point out what's missing in your review.

1) Your reliance on claimed index size is flawed. BTJunkie's size claim looks to be non-unique torrents. To put it in perspective, isoHunt's non-unique master index is 1.7+ million torrents, while the searcheable index is the 300k+ count published (active and unique torrents).

2) A better methodology on review search engines is to sample search results, and rank by the relevance and scope of the results. You will see the search results counts to be more inline than the claimed index sizes you used for your review.

3) FYI, isoHunt indexes 7/9 other sites you reviewed, including BTJunkie.

4) It would be nice to be more specific in how you rated site features. Also, speed and relevance of search should be important factors for ranking all the sites.

5) Shameless plug: if you are talking about site features, an important one you've missed is cross-referenced trackers in all our indexed torrents. So each torrent we index is augmented by multiple trackers that would be tracking it, so you get the maximum number of peers in your torrent download. No site in your review has this ability, other than Torrentz.com (but they don't cache the torrents so you don't get any benefit for the actual download, as you get the original torrents from original sites).

Cheers,
IH

Great Tool

Scrapetorrent [http://scrapetorrent.com/] provides both a web-based and a FireFox plugin search tool for scanning TorrentSpy, PirateBay, IsoHunt and MiniNova. I find it wickedly convenient.

i'm just glad

they don't list the one I use... is that selfish? YUP!

Index indexer

And this site has a fair go at searching through all the best BT sites - http://torrent-finder.com/index.wld [torrent-finder.com]

Taco gettin uppity

But why is it that so many torrent sites are so ugly?

You mean like, as ugly as Slashdot before three months ago? :-)

mldonkey and dllink

Some of the torrent trackers use download links that does URL redirection that mldonkey isn't able to handle when the "dllink $url" command is sent to it. BTjunkie is one which gives me problem, isohunt and piratebay torrent links works fine for me. Anyone has any idea if there is a fix for this or should I simply stick to sites with links that work?

Re:Grammar Police vs. TFA

M'lud - we move for summary dismissal on medical grounds. The accused suffers from not only an article deficiency, but also a form of schizophrenia known as fragmentation. If we examine the statement from by the Grammar Police this is really self-evident.

Their index is comprised of only torrents they index on their tracker, but don't worry because there the tracker has almost 350,000 torrents.

Also: -

Torrent Portal is famous for there a large following of faithful uploaders

The defence rests, whilst awaiting the completion of the defendants fragment upon return of their original personality.