It shouldn’t be news to you that Mininova, one of the largest torrent indexers on the planet, deleted their torrents index and went ‘legal’. While not completely shut down (their content distribution service is still alive), this move has rendered Mininova useless for many who used the site daily. However what’s important is that Mininova didn’t bend over and shut down – they went down fighting. After losing in courts to BREIN, there was very little they could have done to keep the site running. This move however doesn’t mean it’s all over for BitTorrent – there are hundreds of sites that are waiting to take Mininova’s place. It goes like this – Before Mininova there was Suprnova, after Mininova there are others.
If you are a long time reader of this blog, there is a high likelihood of you being a member of a private torrent tracker (if you still haven’t, we strongly recommend you check out our private trackers section – they are not that hard to get into). But if you depend on public trackers, indexers and search engines for your day to day torrenting needs, this article should help. It summarizes information about several such sites you can use. Some of these sites use a BitTorrent tracker of their own (Mininova did not have a tracker expect for their CDS – it merely indexed and hosted .torrent files), some index .torrent files and others are real time search engines. Hope you’ll find at least a few of the above listed sites useful.
KickAssTorrents 
Site Name: KickAssTorrents (http://www.kickasstorrents.com/)
Stats: 2.8 million indexed torrents
Description: A new and promising torrent indexer with a host of usability features. Allows torrent downloading via HTTP, Magnet links and regular BT. In addition to the neatly crafted user interface, they have a regularly updated blog and a Twitter account. A FireFox search plugin and a vuze search template are also available. Easily one of the best public torrent indexers around.
Site Name: ExtraTorrents (http://extratorrent.com/)
Stats: 1.4 million torrents tracked by 45000+ trackers
Description: One of the promising new public BitTorrent sites. Has a nice set of features including trusted uploaders, detailed torrent descriptions, bookmarking, one click hosting links and so on.
Darkside_RG 
Site Name: http://94.75.224.58/forums/
Registration URL: http://94.75.224.58/forums/index.php?act=Reg&CODE=00
Stats: 160000+ members
Description: Unnoticed by many, DarkSide_RG is a forum based BitTorrent community that has releasers and rippers of their own (Register an account on site and login to see torrents section). You can read a full review of DarkSide in this recent article.
1337x 
Site Name: 1337x (http://1337x.org/)
Stats: 30800+ torrents and 64600+ members
Description: l33x is a free leech community that has no ratio rules. They are currently upgrading to a new version but you can still access the site using the old interface via http://1337x.org/old/. Their homepage states “RIP MiniNova we will all miss you as you were.”
Site Name: H33T (http://h33t.com)
Signup URL: http://h33t.com/account.php (Optional)
Stats: 95000+ torrents
Description: This is probably one of the most underrated semi-private trackers of all time. Comics, portable applications, All-In-One packs, movies, music, games – they are all here. There are almost no fakes here. We posted a detailed review of H33T sometime back and the article can be found here.
Monova 
Site Name: Monova (http://www.monova.org)
Stats: 2.8 million torrents
Description: A torrent indexer that has a ‘confirmed torrents’ feature. In other words, chances that a confirmed torrent being a fake is nil. For those migrating from Mininova, you can claim your Mininova username through this page.
TorrentFly 
Site Name: TorrentFly (http://www.torrentfly.org)
Stats: Searches 12 large BT sites
Signup URL: http://www.torrentfly.org/signup
Description: TorrentFly is a real time BitTorrent search engine which crawls multiple external sites for a given search phrase. It does not host any .torrent files or operate a tracker but points to external sites in search results. Optional registration allows access to advanced features.
Site Name: ArenaBG (http://0.arenabg.com)
Signup URL: http://0.arenabg.com/register.php
Stats: Around 250000 members and 25000+ torrents
Description: For those crossing over from public trackers to private sites, ArenaBG should be definitely one of the easiest sites to use. It’s always open for registration and there are no mandatory ratio rules. Look here for full review and read this to troubleshoot tracker connectivity issues.
ISOHunt 
Site Name: ISOHunt (http://isohunt.com/)
Stats: 4.1 million active torrents across 128000 trackers
Description: We all know this one. ISOHunt has been fighting the good fight for several years. They’ve been sued by anti piracy and they have sued anti piracy in return. One of the largest and best torrent indexers on the planet. ISOHunt also operates the Podtropolis tracker which specializes in mobile content as well as Hexagon P2P portal.
BTJunkie 
Site Name: BTJunkie (http://btjunkie.org/)
Stats: 4.1 million + torrents tracked across 17000+ trackers
Description: This one is f’ing huge. BTJunkie is a veteran torrent indexer that’s been around for several years. Over 25000 new torrents are added daily. It ndexes torrents by some private trackers as well.
SuperFundo 
Site Name: SuperFundo (http://superfundo.org/)
Stats: Unknown
Description: Superfundo does not operate a BitTorrent tracker of their own but hosts a large amount of verified, non fake movie torrents released by a number of p2p encoders such as FxG, FxM, KLAXXON, etc. Full review can be found here.
TorrentBox 
Site Name: TorrentBox (http://torrentbox.com)
Stats: ~24000 torrents
Description: With an Alexa rank of ~11000, TorrentBox is a popular BitTorrent site that operates a public tracker of their own. TB now comes with SSL encryption for added security. TorrentBox tracker is run by the same crew behind BitTorrent giant ISOHunt.
SumoTorrent 
Site Name: SumoTorrent (http://www.sumotorrent.com/)
Stats: If site stats are correct, there are 4.5 million indexed torrents
Description: SumoTorrent is another huge public BitTorrent site that operates a tracker of their own (SumoTracker). Has an Alexa rank of ~1300. ST now comes with a improved layout which is more user friendly.
Site Name: AliveTorrents (http://www.alivetorrents.com)
Stats: Unknown
Description: A decent torrent indexer with bookmarking features, related torrents display and more. AT does host .torrent files although they do not operate a tracker. You can follow them on Twitter as well.
BitTorrent.am 
Site Name: BitTorrent.AM (http://bittorrent.am/)
Stats: Unknown
Description: BitTorrent.am operates a huge public tracker along with a torrent index and search features.
Site Name: Torrents.To (http://www.torrents.to)
Stats: 4.1 million torrents across 128000+ trackers
Description: Another torrent search engine with a sleek user interface. Does not host .torrent files but links to those found in external sites such as ISOHunt.
TorrentZ 
Site Name: TorrentZ (http://torrentz.com/)
Stats: 6 million + active torrents tracked by 900+ live trackers
Description: TorrentZ is a huge meta search engine that fetches torrents tracked by hundreds of external trackers. Great interface and informative torrent description pages. It’s actually an excellent tool to find other public trackers.
Last but not least, we take this opportunity to thank Mininova for the great service they’ve rendered to the file sharing community in general. 5 years is a long time and they will be remembered by millions of torrenters who used the site in many more years to come.
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