The world of peer-to-peer file sharing (P2P) was dealt a serious blow yesterday as one of the most popular torrent search engines, The Pirate Bay, was reportedly purchased by the Sweden based Global Gaming Factory X for $7.74 million. While that's great news for the people behind The Pirate Bay (TPB), it's horrible news for all of its 20 million users, as TPB will now only distribute legal user uploaded content in an attempt to compete with YouTube. Good luck with that. You might want to start out by calling yourself something other than "The Pirate Bay."
But we've seen this story before: a file sharing company gets taken down only to be replaced by it's competitors. And though TPB will be missed, users will no doubt move on to the many other torrent sites on the 'net. If you're looking for a new go-to torrent search site, or just looking to get into the torrent game, check out our five favorite sites below...
ISOHUNT
• Launched: January 2003
• Overview: Founded by Canadian Gary Fung, Iso Hunt quickly boasted a following of 7.4 million users. The site features a clean interface, with no registration needed. Results are quick and prompt. You'll have no problem finding the latest albums and movies with more than enough seeds to keep your downloads moving along quickly.
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DEMONOID
• Launched: April 2003
• Overview: The most exclusive site on the list, to access Demonoid's user uploaded torrents you must be a member and to be member you must be invited or wait until they periodically open up their registration. You can thank the Canadian Recording Industry for that. Their strength lies in their community which doesn't allow the uploading of pornography, and closely monitors every users download and upload ratio's to make sure everyone gets the best use out of the site.
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MININOVA
• Launched: January 2005
• Overview: Launched as a follow up to the popular Supernova tracker, Mininova is one of the largest torrent sites on the net with over 8 million downloads. Mininova's homepage shows the newest and most popular uploads in every genre featured on the site. It was reported that this past May they started trying out a content recognition system to sniff out any illegal content. As far as we can tell, they're not doing a very good job.
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FENOPY
• Launched: March 2006
• Overview: A meta torrent search engine, Fenopy searches a number of different torrent sites.
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BTJUNKIE
• Launched: June 2005
• Overview: BTJunkie acts as a webcrawler for torrent sites across the 'Net, searching both public and private trackers, kinda negating the need to join some membership only sites. It also offers some unique features like Torrentmail which is a service that emails you when certain new torrents are added.
