There's not much to improve about BitTorrent. It's a very fast way to download pretty much anything, and because everyone downloading is also sharing, it's very rare for a file to disappear so long as people are interested in it.

Sometimes however, it can be a little taxing to find the file you're looking for. With many different torrent trackers finding a file often means exploring them all one-by-one before eventually finding it.

Windows and Linux users can find relief from this, however, thanks to Torrent Search.

This program looks through a variety of different trackers to match you with the file you're looking for, and with very fast searching to boot.

What It Does

Fire up this program and you'll see a very simple - almost spartan, one might say - interface. There's really not much to do but type what you're looking for, but when you do you'll quickly start seeing results:

torrent search

The results can be sorted by any of the visible columns, although I'm sure most of the time sorting by "Seeders" is what's going to work best for you.

The results come from a variety of different Torrent sites; see a current list of plugins here. As the tracker community is constantly changing, it's good to see a program based on an easy-to-update plugin system.

Torrent Search is not a client; you cannot use it to download files via BitTorrent. What happens when you double-click a torrent in your search depends on how you've set the program. There are a few options:

bit torrent search engines

As you can see, it's possible to set the program to launch your standard BitTorrent client, or to save the file to a particular folder. The latter option can be very useful if you're using Dropbox to remotely launch a BitTorrent download. Do that and you've got a really slick way to remotely launch a download.

Downloading

You'll find Ubuntu (.deb) and Windows downloads for the program over at Torrent Search's download page. You'll also find the source code there, if you're using a different Linux distribution and want to try compiling this program from source.

Alternatively, you can find a portable Linux version of Torrent Search over at PortableLinuxApps, a site that offers portable applications that work on any Linux distribution.

Web-Based Alternative

torrent search

If you're looking for a web-based tool similar to this, I highly recommend checking out ScrapeTorrent, a website capable of searching every major torrent tracker at once. Sure, it won't automatically download your torrents to a particular site, and you're going to see a lot more advertisements on this site than you will using Torrent Search, but it works on a Mac and you just might like it.

Conclusion

Whether you prefer Torrent Search or the web-based ScrapeTorrent, it's nice to have one place to go to find whatever file you're looking for. Do you like either of these tools, or do you have another tool you prefer? Share what you know below, because then everyone else will know too. Oh and don't forget to download MakeUseOf's Torrent Guide for more information.