Top 20 Torrent Sites

[talkgold]

For those file sharers out there. Here is a list compiled with the top 35 torrent sites:

#1 The Pirate Bay (Pirate Bay, by readership size, is the most popular torrent search site today. Pirate Bay has an immense database of 360,000 torrents, the third largest database after Isohunt and Torrentspy.)
(May 31, 2006 update: The Pirate Bay has been shut down by Swedish authorities. Details are available on the Pirate Bay home page.)
(June 2006 update: The Pirate Bay has restarted operations, now that the police have duplicated the PB hard drives for forensic purposes. Enjoy this database while it is still around, folks!)

#2 Demonoid (a personal favorite of many About.com readers, Demonoid is also a major tracker database that supports thousands of swarms around the globe)

#3 Torrentspy.com offers over 420,000 torrents in its database, the largest torrent index that is readily available to the public. Enjoy it while you can.

#4 Torrentscan.com (a "meta-search" engine, which is a search engine that searches other search engines)

#5 Torrentreactor.to (Torrentreactor has made a comeback from a hijacking and an uncooperative hosting service. They have moved to a different server setup and a Tonga country domain outside the USA. Read the details on their home page.)

#6 Mininova.org has 150,000 torrents indexed as of December, 2006. Mininova is the successor to Suprnova, one of the original big torrent databases of the Web.

#7 Isohunt.com
January 22 update, 2007: Although Isohunt was suddenly shut down by its original ISP before the weekend, the administrators have relaunched the service on a new ISP with new hardware. There are still problems, but Isohunt does live for the time being. The MPAA lawsuit is slated for a March summary judgment, so make sure you use Isohunt now, while you still can.
January 8 update, 2007: Isohunt has nearly 400,000 torrents in their database. Also noteworthy: any Isohunt torrent listed as "ISOhunt release" means that it is a file verified by the administrators...a nice feature to help you locate authentic torrents and not fake files. On a sad note: Isohunt is being sued by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) for copyright infringement. If you want to use this tremendous Canadian site, you better use it while you can.

#8 TorrentTyphoon.com (a unique bittorrent meta-search engine that searches several of the most popular sites. Unfortunately, it does not do a good job categorizing the torrent files themselves)

#9 Torrentbox.com Update: like Isohunt, Torrentbox is being sued by the MPAA as of February 28, 2006. The days for this fine search engine may be numbered.

#10 Torrentmatrix.com

#11 Scrapetorrent.com is another torrent meta-search engine that is gaining popularity.

#12 ByTorrents Meta Search

#13 Torrentportal.com

#14 Snarf It! (born from previous Suprnova influences)

#15 BTjunkie

#16 Torrentz.com (special thanks to reader, Jonathan R., for this link)

#17 Torrents.to

#18 LegalTorrents.com (As the name implies, this is a database of public-domain content. Thanks to Anand S. for this URL.)

#19 Thinktorrent.com

#20 FileList.org