TorrentUs
| Torrentus | |
|---|---|
| Web address | (formerly tornado.li until September 2012) |
| Commercial? | No |
Type of site | Torrent search engine, magnet links provider |
| Registration | Optional |
| Available in | English |
| Launched | 15 September 2011 |
Alexa rank |
 4068 (February 2014)[1] |
| Current status | Online |
TorrentUs is a search engine for files from BitTorrent network. It indexes more than 20 million torrents from various international sources like The Pirate Bay, KickassTorrents, EZTV and Torrentproject including the BitTorrent DHT Bittorrent network using RSS or database dump technology. Responsible for this torrent search engine is IT-company Baxter Sales Corporation[2] that owns several torrent sites like Torrentus and TorrentDB.
In last years Torrentus moved several times to different domains. The service was launched in 2011 under the name Tornado.[3] The developers used a simple classical database structure to store torrent files. The special web crawler indexed external torrent sites for newest .torrent files using their RSS feeds and imported the information into own database. With years the amount of data raised rapidly and the system was not able to store high amount of database entries anymore. So new art of non-classical database was developed to solve the problem with limits of database queries. The new system was applied in August 2012 and Tornado was transferred to new brand named Torrentus.
Usage
The site provides a simple and intuitive user interface. Torrentus offers a possibility to register a free account to be able to rate torrent files for computer viruses, password protection or fakes. Users are allowed to comment anonymously on torrent content.
Web search query can be performed in a simple or an advanced way and the list of results can be filtered by age, size, date, seeds or leechs, category, source and by "safety" (adult content).
Torrentus has own content writers that run a blog.[4] The news from Bittorrent and Peer-2-Peer world will be posted here to provide full information about the networks and give tutorials on how to use the technology in the right and legal way.
Advanced Usage
Torrentus is an open source project and can provide the code for external sites to implement into own search. This would work in the similar way as Google's Custom Search.
Multi-tracker index
A multilingual torrent metasearch includes external Bittorrent sites and trackers from different countries, genres and languages. For today Torrentus indexes about 50 resources with minute update rhythmus.
Technology
Current version of Torrentus backend engine designed to be scalable. The developed technology is based on open source solutions only. The heart of Torrentus is distributed fault-tolerant Database, which allows to store million and billion records without performance degradation. What’s why the main goal of Torrentus is to index all known torrents in the network and get the largest search engine ever. Sphinx is used as main engine to manage the search. Current cluster contains 5 servers. The Frontend is designed and driven by flexible PHP programming language.
Advantages
The idea to have a site where it's simple to find needed torrent file was always liked by the users. Torrentus saves time cause it provides search results from dozen of bittorrent sources in seconds.
Disadvantages
Torrentus is dependent from the community. The website indexes all torrent files without previous check, so user generated action is required to provide feedback about file's quality. The community should take care about sorting our of bad or broken files from the search results.
Legal action
DMCA takedown notices
Torrentus has a history of complying with DMCA takedown notices and continues working with various copyright owners like RIAA, Microsoft or Brein. The removal requests come from Google's side as also will be sent directly to the website's administrators. There were 22,192 complains with 610,893 URLs received from Google[5] and about 364,000 torrents excluded from search by torrent search engine directly. Every single copyright request was processed by the team within the statutory time limit.
Lawsuit actions
The efforts of association for the Protection of the Rights of the Entertainment Industry of the Netherlands (Brein) to shut down Torrentus' website, domain and Web Hosting Provider failed because all requirements concerning blocking of several .torrent files were fulfilled within the statutory time. The fact that Torrentus is a torrent search engine that indexes torrent sites and doesn't store torrent files was taken into consideration while the shut down request was demanded.
History
15. September 2011: Tornado.li will be launched and the new site starts to index the BitTorrent trackers.
3. September 2012: Tornado moves to new domain and creates a brand name TorrentUs. The new site will be launched under the .to domain extension.
14. April 2014: TorrentUs moves the new domain under .eu ending.
See also
Comparison of BitTorrent sites
References
- ↑ "Torrentus.to Site Info". Alexa Internet. Retrieved 2014-02-22.
- ↑ "Interview with Baxter Sales Corporation owner Oleksandr Orlov about Torrents.to (prev. Tornado.li)".
- ↑ "Tornado.li Torrent Search Engine > Torrents.to (prev. Tornado.li) at zeropaid.com". zeropaid.com. Retrieved 2014-02-19.
- ↑ "Torrentus Blog. Bittorrent and P2P News".
- ↑ "Google's Transparency Report for Torrentus.to".
External links
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