From Paul Gil,
Your Guide to Internet for Beginners.
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"What Are The Five Best Torrent Search Engines?"

A. As of May 6, 2008, 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.

Related: How to speed up your Bit Torrent client download speed

April 2008: Demonoid.com is now back online! They have established themselves outside of the USA, 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.

• **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: ShareTV.org (ShareTV is dedicated to sharing television episodes and entire TV series. Find "24", "Heroes", and "Lost" episodes here. Special thanks to Chris R. for telling us about his web site.)
  
  
• **Special mention: Mininova.org has 250,000 torrents indexed as of Jan, 2008. Mininova is the successor to Suprnova, one of the original big torrent databases of the Web.
  
  

1. Isohunt.com
   If you want to use this tremendous Canadian site, you better use it while you can. Note: any torrent listed as "ISOhunt release" means that it is a file verified by the administrators...a nice feature to help you get authentic torrents, not fake files.)
   
   
2. Torrentspy.com March 24, 2008: Torrentspy has voluntarily closed its doors. Instead of conforming to the American court mandates to change their privacy policies, the Torrentspy team has opted instead to cease operations. A sad day for downloaders everywhere.
   
   
3. 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.
   
   
4. Torrentscan.com (a meta-search engine: Torrenscan is a search engine that searches other torrent search engines)
   
   
5. 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.
   
   

Continued: The Complete Top 35 Torrent Sites List.


More BitTorrent articles:

• BitTorrents 101: How BitTorrent Downloading Works.
  
• The Best BitTorrent Client Software of 2007.
  
• Meet Bram Cohen, the creator of BitTorrent open source code.
  
• Overview of P2P copyright legalities.
  
• Tip: How to speed up your BitTorrent client download speed
  
• The Complete Top 35 Torrent Sites List.

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