Research, Analysis, Views - Just another Globalthoughtz | Right to Information weblog

The file sharing culture has surpassed our imagination. The peer to peer file sharing is one of the top activities of most of the internet users. Though user the scrutiny of digital laws, there seems to be no way of stopping this phenomenon. Recent action against the pirate bay to stop the service went no where. The internet laws are getting stronger against such activity, only recent British law had announced that whoever using such service would be penalized.

Therefore, its interesting to know what are the top services that people are using to download and search for files. In technical terms these files are known as torrent, a portal to the actual files. If you just type torrent in the search engine than you will find huge resources of medias and files.

Here are the top 10 torrent search engines:

Remember not all torrent are for FREE. There are many services which requires you to pay for the torrent, so its not entirely illegal. Mininova tops the chart with 0.81% of the internet users and with 15.80% from the search engine. The percentage of traffic to these sites are usually from India and US.

According to Wikipedia, only few of the above sites are registered. Here are few:

1. Mininova

The site is based in the Netherlands and started in January 2005 as a successor to the (at that time very popular) Suprnova.org, which went offline at the end of 2004 due to legality issues.

2. The Pirate Bay

The website is primarily funded with advertisements shown next to torrent listings. Initially established in November 2003 by the Swedish anti-copyright organisation Piratbyrån (The Piracy Bureau) the website is run as a separate organisation since October 2004.

3. Isohunt

isoHunt is a BitTorrent index with over 1.7 million^[1] torrents in its database and 20 million peers from indexed torrents.^[2] With 7.4 million unique visitors as of May 2006, isoHunt is one of the most popular BitTorrent search engines.

4. TorrentReactor (no mention)

5. BTJunkie

BTJunkie is an advanced BitTorrent search engine. It uses a web crawler (similar to Google)^{[citation needed]} to search for torrent files from other torrent sites and store it in its database. It has over 3,700,000 active torrents and about 4,200 torrents added daily (compared to runner-up Torrent Portal with 1,500), making it the largest torrent site indexer on the web.^[1]

6. Demonoid

The website indexes torrents uploaded by its members. It was the second largest,^[1][2] and is the most popular, semi-public tracker,^[3] and was ranked the 499th most popular website overall in December 2008, according to Alexa.^[4] Demonoid’s torrent tracker had an estimated 3 million peers in September 2007.^[3]

7. SumoTorrent (no mention)

8. Vertor (no mention)

9. zoozle (no mention)

10. Torrentportal (no mention)

Web Analysis According to alexa

Analysis

There are many resources available in the internet for any one to be using it. Peer to peer file sharing makes it very easy to share things in internet. But due to the circulation of illegal content this has surely hit the market very hard. Especially in the area of Movies and Music, torrent search engine plays a vital role. The data shows that the activity of the user in these sites are high and content search over internet is getting more popular day by day.

For information in torrent do visit torrentfreak, this is the blog related all to the news about torrent and its industry.