BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol used to distribute large amounts of data. The initial distributor of the complete file or collection acts as the first seed. Each peer who downloads the data also uploads them to other peers. Relative to standard internet hosting, this provides a significant reduction in the original distributor’s hardware and bandwidth resource costs.

Today, we are going to see of the very popular torrent service that called Mininova. This service is one of the most popular torrents indexing service. It’s one of the services that I use frequently to download stuff. Alright, so let’s see what this service does and how it is useful for a common user like you and me. Just to get an idea of what you can do with torrents, you might wanna read this post on Downloading Torrents: Checklist for Movie buffs using Free Torrent Sites. Users of mininova can anonymously upload torrents to this site which is tracked by any bit torrent tracker.

The great part about this service is that they don’t log your IP information making your activity on the site completely anonymous. However, this service doesn’t allow for pornographic content to be uploaded or tracked by their traker. According to mininova, more than 5 billion downloads are there at mininova. This site was started in the year 2005.

Following are some interesting stats related to Mininova as of June this year:

• Total torrent downloads: 5,360,573,100
• Total seeds: 5,923,574
• Total torrents in database: 791,045
• Total number of trackers: 15,599
• Total leechers: 5,286,306

Mininova also has a great reputation of being the 9th Googled word in the year 2006. Mininova also has a toolbar which makes your torrent related activity just a click away.

The search interface of mininova is as easy as it can get with features like advanced search, categories and tag cloud. Following is a video which is a mininova guide.

A great service. We hope that it doesn’t go down because of legal issues.

Torrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol used to distribute large amounts of data. The initial distributor of the complete file or collection acts as the first seed. Each peer who downloads the data also uploads them to other peers. Relative to standard internet hosting, this provides a significant reduction in the original distributor’s hardware and bandwidth resource costs. It also provides redundancy against system problems and reduces dependence on the original distributor.

Now in a lay man’s language it’s a mean to share files. So why is torrent so popular! The reason is because you can literally share anything for free. That means all the copyright stuff can be shared as well. Think about the possibilities, you can share, movies, music, games, ebooks, softwares, NSFW stuff etc.

Let’s see what you need to get started with using torrents.

What we are going to focus in this post is none of the above. We are assuming that you know itty-bitty of torrent or are already pro using them. We are going to bring you two services which help you search multiple torrent search engines in one go. This makes it easier to find what you are looking for.

1. Torrentz.com: This one’s very popular and I am sure you must have been using it already. The best part is the tag cloud of what people are searching. Thus giving you an idea of what’s hot on internet and torrent community at that moment. It also gives you an idea of what to search for and how. In the screenshot below music 2008 is probably the highest searched term.

2. usniff.com: This one’s pretty cool too and I was hit on by this one very recently. I like the whole web 2.0 feel to it. Good feature is it shows “Top Searchs”, giving you an idea of what people are looking for.

I am sure there are many of such services, but these two are probably the best. Have fun leeching!