Quickly Search for your torrents

As this blog is dedicated to education of people too busy to be too involved in certain niches of technology, and because the blog authors are also too busy to be too involved in any branch of technology (we just want to get the job done with the sharpest axe around) we gotta spend some time explaining the basic technology.

For downloads, there're a lot of developments lately optimized for our huge residential data pipes. For example, I'm on 6.5Mbit/s download and only 384Kbit/s upload. If you sucked at maximum speed all the time, many of the servers you download from would only be able to sustain maximum speed for a small number of people - so they place restrictions on how fast anybody can download at a time, probably to the tune of 800kbit/s - so that other users can also download but at a lower speed.

For truly breathtaking speed, you've gotta download from many people at a time, perhaps hundreds or thousands. This is called peer-to-peer file sharing, but here, we'll discuss the variant called bit-torrent protocol, which enables you to download little pieces of the file you want, from hundreds or thousands at a time, a little at a time, but combined, these little contributions to your download speed could add up to a big big number.

To use the bit-torrent protocol, first you need to download a bit-torrent client. Current `hot choices' are µtorrent, BitComet and azureus all of which have been tested by the community to be `safe' in that they don't contain malware or spyware or viruses. My preference is µtorrent as it is really fast, really small and simple to optimze its connectivity options. On the other end is azureus which is large, filled with options and really flexible with plugins etc. but if you had to use it as a novice, you'd give up this branch of technology because of its daunting configuration options. BitComet has a different encryption scheme from µtorrent and azureus, so you'd probably get better results with µtorrent and azureus. If what I'm saying sounds greek to you, just get µtorrent.

To start downloading using the bit torrent protocol, you first have to find a file with information about the files you want, especially WHERE to get the files from. This information is stored in a .torrent file. Unless you're an out-and-out geek, this is all you need to know.

How to find these .torrent files? Let's say, you want to download the latest and greatest version of ubuntu Linux, what do you do?

You need a search engine. Google is the quintessential search engine, but it may not be updated sufficiently. If you want to use Google, just type: `ubuntu torrent' at the search box, click on the search result and finally the torrent file, and utorrent will automatically start.

A sharper and better way, would be to get to a website which specializes in torrents, like mininova.org but it may not have everything. Even better than that, download a toolbar like Torrent Toolbar (the link is for firefox, but if you search around, IE versions are available) and you get a toolbar with all the major torrent search sites integrated within and also automatically grab RSS feeds from these torrent search engines to inform you on what's new available on their indexes. The problem is that this toolbar doesn't search from all sites at once though, so you have to cycle through the websites to get what you want.

The point of this posting is to announce a wonderful new website - ScrapeTorrent, which integrates all the sites into one search interface and present all the torrents available to you for sorting according to which site has the most seeders, for example, so as to maximize your download speeds. At this time, this is it for me. I'm gonna use this for most of my needs. But I'll still keep the Torrent Toolbar at my firefox just just in case this site goes down.