7 Multi-Site Torrent Search Tools For the Swarthy Downloader

by Lee Mathews Sep 19th 2008

So, it's torrent booty ye be after? Well, matey, I'll be happy to share a list of me favorite places to find forbidden treasures.

Millions of torrents, thousands of places to look for them...What's a wayfarin' buccaneer to do? Why, search a whole pile of places at the same time, of course. After all, you're more likely to find gold with seven maps to the same pot than you are with just one.

Enough of the played-out pirate jargon already, on to the sites!

Simultaneous Searching

NowTorrents. Searches up to twelve sites at once. I like the file type tabs and health indicator, and they offer a Firefox and IE compatible search plugin.

uSniff. I wrote about uSniff before, and I use it quite often. I don't really search a lot of different sites, usually just Pirate Bay and IsoHunt, and they're both supported (along with six others). The interface is clean and responds quickly - the search box throws some people off, though. I don't understand why, it's giant, orange, and says "search" on it. They also have a search plugin for IE and Firefox.

ScrapeTorrent. Offers a nice preference page and searches nine sites at once. Piratebay, IsoHunt, Mininova, and Demonoid are included, and they're my go-to sites anyways. I approve!

Speckly. I hate the way it displays results: gobs and gobs of text, Google style, and all on one page. There aren't any sorting options, though you can at least view by file type.

Torrentz. Technically it searches multiple sites, but you'll get a general results page first. Clicking one of the results will take you to a listing of all the individual torrents. I find it an annoying process, and don't use Torrentz as a result.

Manual Multi-Site Searching (Radio buttons and whatnot)

Torrent Pond / ActiveDots. 22 search options for you to search one at a time. I suppose it beats visiting all the sites individually. Way back when, this was my multi-site search of choice.

Torrent Finder. Ok, this one is just ridiculous. Do you really want to spend your time searching 156 torrent sites? There's what, a half dozen or so that are really, really good? I'm not a fan of this behemoth, but it scores some points for being exhaustive.

You know where to find them, now fire up your favorite client and start downloading some torrents!

Tags: bittorrent, search, torrent, torrents, trackers

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Pete said 10:15AM on 9-19-2008

NowTorrents is by far the best and most advanced one. I use it everyday!

You can also use http://www.nowtors.com if you want a shorter domain or http://www.torrenteye.com if you want different color layout. Both the same as nowtorrents, made by the same owner too. Just other styles.

Khuffie said 1:14PM on 9-19-2008

I like http://www.torrents.to myself

Toni said 2:28PM on 9-19-2008

http://search.io/torrents/ is very nice

Timmy said 2:34PM on 9-19-2008

I also always use http://www.nowtorrens.com

By far the best!

Doranwen said 11:37PM on 9-19-2008

Didn't NowTorrents use to search 18 sites? Somewhere they shrunk . . . they're still my favorite, though, for a quick "is it out there" search. I search Demonoid second--for the ones I can't find on the main search, Demonoid often comes through (and there's always the forums).

Pete said 3:19AM on 9-20-2008

Yes NowTorrents had 18, now 12. They only kept the best engines as the other 6 had lots of fakes, dups and slow results.

Quality > Quantity

I just spoted http://www.torrrenteye.com and http://www.torrentin.com which are also both by the NowTorrents owner and do exactly the same thing, but simply a different color layout.

Mike said 8:33AM on 10-10-2008

I prefer the new http://www.torrentfly.org

Mimi said 3:45PM on 11-29-2008

Thanks! These should make torrenting lot easier.

I'm olive-skinned--do you think it would be okay to share these with some of my paler friends?

Inteligent Coward said 4:07AM on 12-24-2008

I personally prefer TorrentScan.com for the manual radio button thing. It has 15 engines (although I wouldn't use a couple).

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