YouTorrent: Give It A Shot Before It's Shut Down

youtorrent.jpgYouTorrent is a fairly new BitTorrent search engine that has been getting positive reviews of late, so I gave it a shot.

The premise is simple: YouTorrent is a meta-search engine that indexes torrents from other sites (such as btjunkie, The Pirate Bay), then prioritizes the results based on the number of seeds and peers each torrent has. For example a search for something like Cloverfield offers multiple results but most importantly provides the torrent with the most participants first. For those not familiar with BitTorrent, the more seeds and peers a Torrent has, the faster the file will likely download.

As a meta-search engine YouTorrent doesn’t discriminate against legal and pirated content (yes, there is legal content on BitTorrent) so it’s a case of anything goes, and this is both a strength and a weakness. If you do frequently download using BitTorrent you’ll love YouTorrent, it’s quick and the results it gives negates the need to use other sites when searching for Torrents. On the other hand YouTorrent efficiently facilitates video piracy; sure, there’s an ongoing legal argument as to whether a search engine can be held liable for indexing pirated content elsewhere, but that didn’t help TorrentSpy when the Feds came knocking. The site is hosted in the Netherlands and has a Moniker hide your details service running on the Whois record, but chances are if the owners are in the United States, it’s probably only a matter of time until the MPAA or RIAA sends in the lawyers, so give it a shot while you still can.

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