We don’t think many of you are familiar with the name ‘Tottler’. We too weren’t, but that was until @fNazR Tweeted us an interesting link. Tottler is an innovative new service that could become very popular amongst users of private torrent trackers. At first glance, it appears as a search engine that searches multiple private trackers for a given query (without the need for logging in). But that’s not all, Tottler is perhaps the first web based torrent tracer service. The site is said to monitor 30 torrent sites across the world. Most site features are available to non registered users but registering (which is free) will allow you to use advanced services such as ‘subscriptions’ option.
Let’s talk about Tottler’s seemingly primary function first – torrent search. Tottler will search multiple private trackers for any given search query in seconds.
But there is a limitation – search results do not provide a direct download link to the torrent file. This is understandable since most (if not all) torrent files are hosted on private trackers which require login. Anyways this should help users to find which release is available on which tracker, without having to log in to any of them. The search algorithm could be improved as it sometimes missed out trackers that already had the release we searched for.
Now here is the interesting part – if you click on one of the search results, it’ll take you to a page which lists the pre times of all trackers that uploaded that particular torrent file:
I think you’ve all heard about IRC tracer channels which track the pre times across multiple private torrent sites (if you haven’t, read this – this channel is dead btw). Tottler too can act as a tracer, only difference of it being a web based service.
According to the ‘Help’ page in Tottler, the service is based on tracker RSS feeds. Whether or not recorded pre times are affected by the delay in RSS feed updating is not clear as of now. Note that if you click on the torrent site name in search results or in pre time listing (hyperlinked in green), it’ll take you to a page which lists the last torrents uploaded to that tracker.
You can also subscribe to get updates on certain releases. This feature will only be available once you register and log into the site. More information about Tottler may be found on their Help page.
Site Name: Tottler (http://tottler.org)
Signup URL: http://tottler.org/signup
Note: According to Tottler’s Twitter feed, Internet Explorer is blocked from the new version of site.
