I found a search engine yesterday that is the latest offering from FreshMash featuring a torrent search engine powered by TRYANT and Yahoo!
Torrents! is a mash-up between TRYNT, an API developer and Yahoo! Using it means that you combine searching for torrents and the powerful indexing of the Yahoo! search engine. Due to the nature of the content though I would be cautious as to where I went from there.
Torrent search engines and trackers usually maintain their own databases. They do this by either accepting user submissions or sending out bots and scrapers. Torrents! is different in that it accesses data that has been indexed by Yahoo! That means a powerful search engine for the torrents you want, as long as you don’t care where it comes from.
Search by topic or name of the media or file that you are wanting. Results are displayed as a list that contain a link to the site that has the torrent. It does not link directly to the torrent. This is where it gets a bit tricky. Because Torrents! uses the Yahoo! indexing it means that the torrent you get in the result could be on any site, good, bad or ugly. The way that I looked at this service was time consuming as every result I wanted to look at I passed through SiteAdvisor’s site details look-up. The “safe” sites that were in the results were mixed. Most I would not recommend anyone visit. One comment on SiteAdvisor in regards to one domain was:
“… If you are using Internet Explorer get out quick!”
Apart from another reason not to use IE I would not want to go there anyway, in addition to the fact that details of the torrent are probably available elsewhere.
Other features include a tag cloud of popular searches and that is about it, after all it is a search engine what more do you want.
In summary, Torrents! will more than likely get you the torrent that you were looking for. But I would be very cautious as to what I clicked on and take appropriate precautions. For me it is not worth it. I would recommend to stick to sites and services that you trust. Judge for yourself but you have been warned.
Rooster's Rail 