Torrentz was a

Finland Finland ( fi, Suomi ; sv, Finland ), officially the Republic of Finland (; ), is a Nordic country in Northern Europe. It shares land borders with Sweden to the northwest, Norway to the north, and Russia to the east, with the Gulf of B ...

-based metasearch engine for BitTorrent, run by an individual known as Flippy, and founded on 24 July 2003. It indexed

torrent Torrent or torrents may refer to: * A fast flowing stream Animals * Torrent duck, a species of the family Anatidae * Torrent fish * Torrent frog, various unrelated frogs * Torrent robin, a bird species * Torrent salamander, a family of s ...

s from various major torrent websites, and offered compilations of various trackers per torrent that were not necessarily present in the default

.torrent In the BitTorrent file distribution system, a torrent file or meta-info file is a computer file that contains metadata about files and folders to be distributed, and usually also a list of the network locations of trackers, which are computer ...

file, so that when a tracker was down, other trackers could do the work. It was the second most popular torrent website in 2012.

Usage

Torrentz's

user interface In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine f ...

was simple; it had only a user menu and a search panel. Users were not required to register before searching files. To perform a search, users would simply type in a string of keywords within the

autocomplete Autocomplete, or word completion, is a feature in which an application predicts the rest of a word a user is typing. In Android and iOS smartphones, this is called predictive text. In graphical user interfaces, users can typically press the ta ...

-enabled search field and execute the search by either pressing the search button in the UI or the

enter key On computer keyboards, the enter key and return key are two closely related keys with overlapping and distinct functions dependent on operating system and application. Functions The return key has its origins in two typewriter functions: ca ...

on the

keyboard Keyboard may refer to: Text input * Keyboard, part of a typewriter * Computer keyboard ** Keyboard layout, the software control of computer keyboards and their mapping ** Keyboard technology, computer keyboard hardware and firmware Music * Musi ...

. From there, a list of matching torrent files were displayed on the screen for the user to choose from. This list could be filtered by age (one day, three days, one week or one month) and by "safety & quality" ("any", "good" or "verified"). The "good" filter was applied by default, and "verified" was reserved for torrents uploaded by well-known groups. Selecting a torrent from the search results list would take the user to another page listing the websites currently hosting the specified torrent (with which users would download files). As Torrentz used meta-search engines, users would be redirected to other torrent sites to download content (commonly

KickassTorrents KickassTorrents (commonly abbreviated KAT) was a website that provided a directory for torrent files and magnet links to facilitate peer-to-peer file sharing using the BitTorrent protocol. It was founded in 2008 and by November 2014, KAT becam ...

, which was considered safe to use).

History

In November 2008,

scammers A confidence trick is an attempt to defraud a person or group after first gaining their trust. Confidence tricks exploit victims using their credulity, naïveté, compassion, vanity, confidence, irresponsibility, and greed. Researchers have de ...

using fake papers attempted to take over the torrentz.com domain. As a backup, the site administrator set up the domain torrentz.eu. After 18 December 2010, torrentz.eu became the site's default domain, due to the domain name seizures carried out by US authorities on various torrent websites. In 2013, Paramount Pictures sent a

DMCA The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a 1998 United States copyright law that implements two 1996 treaties of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). It criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or ...

claim to

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to remove the Torrentz homepage and two other pages from its search engine. Torrentz counter-claimed on this request, claiming that the links did not infringe any copyright policies. On 26 May 2014, Torrentz had its

domain name A domain name is a string that identifies a realm of administrative autonomy, authority or control within the Internet. Domain names are often used to identify services provided through the Internet, such as websites, email services and more. As ...

suspended without a court order following a request from the

Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit The Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) is a unit of the City of London Police, the national lead force for fraud. It was established in 2013 with the responsibility to investigate and deter serious and organised intellectual property c ...

. A day later, the suspension of torrentz.eu was lifted. The website had three alternative domains (.me, .ch and .in) and hoped to move the .eu domain to a new registrar. All of these domains have since been blocked within the UK by

Sky The sky is an unobstructed view upward from the surface of the Earth. It includes the atmosphere and outer space. It may also be considered a place between the ground and outer space, thus distinct from outer space. In the field of astronomy, ...

. The website had similarly been banned in India in 2012 for copyright violations, this led to incidents of hacking activism by Anonymous demanding the unblocking of Torrentz and other websites which had been blocked. On 5 August 2016, Torrentz was shut down by its operators with the message "Torrentz will always love you. Farewell." displayed; it operated for over 13 years.

Clones

In August 2016, a few days after Torrentz shut down, an unofficial clone of Torrentz - Torrentz2.eu - was launched that initially indexed 60 million torrents. Later that month, another unofficial clone - torrentzeu.to - was launched that initially indexed 30 million torrents. At the end of June 2020, the torrentz2.eu domain was shut down but the backup domain torrentz2.is remained accessible. Since November 2020, torrentz2.is and its mirror pages return a " 503 error" to its visitors, although its

.onion .onion is a special-use top level domain name designating an anonymous onion service, which was formerly known as a "hidden service", reachable via the Tor network. Such addresses are not actual DNS names, and the .onion TLD is not in the I ...

domain remains functional.

References

{{BitTorrent Internet properties established in 2003 Defunct BitTorrent websites Finnish websites Notorious markets Internet properties disestablished in 2016 Internet censorship in India

Usage

History

Clones

See also

References