Torrentz Search Engine - Old and New

The Old Torrentz

In 2003, Flippy created a site that could be used to search for BitTorrents. It was a meta-search engine that compiled and ranked the listings on The Pirate Bay, Kickass, BTjunkie, and other Torrent sites. Old snapshots on the Wayback Machine give you some idea of the look and feel of the site.

There was both a .com and a .eu site. The domain history shows that the .com site came first, established in July 2003. It wasn't until 2006 that the EU version of the site picked up its permanent domain registration.

In November 2008, a group of scammers tried to use fake paperwork to take over the torrentz.com domain. This was one of several reasons why the .eu site became the official primary site, after a transition period in late 2010 and early 2011. Around this time was when the U.S. started to execute .com domain seizures focused on Torrent related content. That was sufficient motivation to move operations to Europe.

Pressure from EU authorities started to mount in 2014. For one day in May 2014, authorities shut the site down. It was back the next day when the Polish registrar accepted evidence that the suspension of the domain was unlawful. But that warning shot would spell the beginning of the end.

In August 2016, the original Torrentz was shut down for good. The administrators left a simple message: "Torrentz will always love you. Farewell."

Thus ended the original Torrentz's 13-year run. In the space of three weeks, the community lost not only the most popular Torrent metasearch engine but one of the most popular backup sites in KickassTorrents.

But several clone sites popped up on regional domains throughout the years. For a while, Torrentz2.eu picked up the torch. It claimed to be indexing around 60 million Torrents. But in mid-2020, the Belgian Public Prosecutor issued a takedown order, and they too disappeared from the clearnet, though their .onion domain remained functional.

A Simplified Timeline for Torrentz

• 2003- The torrentz.com site was registered and the original meta-search engine was put up.
• 2006- The torrentz.eu site was registered and mirror established.
• 2008- Scammers attempt to take control of torrentz.com with fake paperwork.
• 2010- Pressure from U.S. law enforcement causes the EU site to become primary.
• 2014- EU authorities request torrentz.eu takedown, but it is reversed after one day.
• 2016- Original Torrentz shuts down for good, within three weeks of KickassTorrents.

The New Torrentz

Since then, a bunch of clone sites has popped up. None of them can claim to be the original Torrentz… but then again, most of them don't want that kind of attention from the governments most interested in copyright.

One that has a fairly standard cloned feel, but less functionality than the original site, is torrentz.eu.com. It claims to be:

'Indexing 31,102,502 active torrents from 125,464,743 pages on 26 domains'

Basic searches work, though there's no pre-categorization available like on the old Torrentz site. If you try to use it without a VPN, it warns you that you aren't browsing securely and attempts to shill a VPN site.

Other Torrentz clones have similar looks, feels, and functionality. They're useful, but not much to look at. Of course, there's no real guarantee of their legitimacy from day to day, so let the user beware.

After 20 years, the Torrentz name is still so powerful that over a dozen domains use a variation of the word for their own torrent tracking websites. Many of them faithfully stick to the original Torrentz look and feel as well.

Torrent Privacy Options

These sites are correct about browsing for and downloading Torrents in the clear: It's a bad idea. Sites get raided, busted, or hacked all the time. The records of you downloading copyright-protected content could land you in serious trouble, and that trouble is normally financial.

Some of these sites suggest using a VPN. But keep in mind that a VPN service is not designed for privacy. If the VPN is untrustworthy, it can manipulate the web browsing experience. They can change the content of ads, sell your browsing history to the highest bidder, or simply not provide the full security that they claim to provide. So if you do use a VPN, make sure you can trust them completely… they're in control the moment you hand your traffic over to them.

Hoody is a better option for many users. It offers a bunch of privacy features that apply to general web browsing. It can protect against device and browser fingerprinting, give access to Onion sites, and circumvent local censorship.

But Hoody also has a lot of Torrent-specific features. It's designed to download a single Torrent at a time, using a fully anonymous Websocket tunnel. It caches trackers and intelligently searches for seeders. That way it can pull down the target file from multiple sources simultaneously.

The Evolution of Torrent Sites and Search Engines

Although general search sites like Torrentz and general hosting sites like The Pirate Bay are still popular to this day, the specialization of Torrent sites was kind of inevitable. With a dozen streaming services out there and so much focus on branded content, it was only a matter of time before TV series and movie Torrent sites emerged. EZTV.re is an example of a general TV series Torrent site. Sub-specialty sites also became popular, such as the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean language anime and manga Torrent site, Nyaa.si.

Similarly, music-only sites and search engines have been popping up steadily over the last decade. Sites like redacted.ch and apollo.rip are almost entirely music-focused. Each has its own tracker and directory functionality, and both completely ignore DMCA requests.

That's not to say that the general Torrent search is dead. Far from it. The Pirate Bay remains an absolute powerhouse. It often ends up as number one in both popularity and actual usage statistics. It has cracked Alexa's top 300 for the most popular site on the Internet. Needless to say, generalist Torrent sites aren't going away any time soon.

Whether one wants to use a general or a specific site depends on the results they're looking for, and whether or not they only want legal content (some sites respect DMCA, but most don't). Other factors such as search speed, indexing update frequency, and regional bias may come into play as well.

Conclusion

Torrentz is gone, but a number of unofficial clones still hang around to this day. Whether or not you trust the reliability or accuracy of their results is a personal decision. The use of a trustworthy VPN, or privacy and security app like Hoody for bulletproof protection, is encouraged when downloading Torrents. Be careful out there!