Just from personal experience, but here is my view of it.

A good search engine for millions of torrents costs several hundred a month. Scrapers to keep torrent seeders / leechers up to date cost another fifty to hundred (depending on how up to date you want your torrents). Now add in a few website servers and a load balancer for another hundred or two. You are looking at three to five hundred a month. Doesn't seem like a lot, but this is just a smallish torrent site. Isn't large enough to generate ad revenue or have enough donators to keep running. Maintaining that by yourself soon get's expensive unless you have a good job with plenty of disposable income.

EDIT: clarification

This part could be eased if there was a protocol for search engines to subscribe to a push-based firehose of presence events on trackers, no?

A better way IMO is to allow the DHT network to query a little bit more information and have arbitrary data attached to a torrent. BEP 44 [1] should really help with that and actually might be a start with truly decentralizing the whole system. With a large enough DHT node base, you don't need to run a tracker to get peer information. On top of that, if you created an immutable record for each torrent with the torrent information (or ran a lightweight torrent system to pull torrent information from a single peer) you can easily get the torrent information to store in the search engine, and then query the DHT for unique peers to get peer information. You can then create comments or ratings with mutable data signed by your server to keep track of good / bad torrents.

I built the first half of that (DHT Crawler essentially) but it was always the peer information that was a pain. It was easier to grab the information from a tracker

1: http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0044.html

DHT crawler written in erlang. It can join a DHT network and crawl many P2P torrents. The program save all torrent info into database and provide an http interface to search a torrent by a keyword

- either you have no money at all, and you'll probably get a pass

- or you have some money, and you'll get sued until all that money goes into the rights-holders' pockets or your lawyers' pockets, whichever comes first

- or you have a fricking huge amount of money, so much that you can withstand any amount of trial thrown at you and probably come out victorious in the long run

It's an attrition fight, and Google is the clear dominant fighter in the arena

I think youtube-dl even supports some of them, which would avoid the malware issue. Mining its supported sites list might be fruitful.

The site doesn't link to copyrighted content. It doesn't link to anything, in fact.

And the extension doesn't contain any references to copyrighted content. It contains no content, and is completely unaware of any sources of content. (No explicit whitelist patterns for sites it should run on, etc.)

And—at least as far as anyone can tell—the two things have different authors.

But put them together, and oops! You've got a piracy program! User's fault for putting them together, of course.

What you're describing is not that different Google in some ways. ISOHunt tried to make the Google argument about just being a search engine... but the distinction is that your visitors come specifically for torrents (mostly of a copyright nature) and your index provides copyright content. Google on the other hand is a general purpose search engine where copyright infringement make up a small percentage of their search. Your site would have to be a general search engine site to have any compelling legal argument.

You could alternatively try to argue that it’s not a “website,” but an app. Google calls certain websites “progressive apps,” for example, so it’s very plausible. That would be interesting.

Then again: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14001903

Quite a large community at the moment. I would however say that the original torrents that were uploaded when they first re-opened it (it was called Pass The Headphones) a lot of the torrents were junk, but the moderators have done a wonderful job allowing torrents to be "trumped".

> Even if you offer the invite in a personal message it is still considered a giveaway and against the rules. Responding to public invite requests is prohibited.

Redacted has an interview process if anyone's interested in joining the site, but don't know any current members personally: https://interviewfor.red/en/index.html

Any observations you have about their apparent opsec would also be interesting.

They're conducting interviews: https://interviewfor.red/en/index.html

Of course, like what, it's really hard to get your ratio up without uploading your own albums, or trumping others. They do however give freeleech tokens every so often.

What was one of the first ones I'll never remember the name of? I swear it was part-run by the guy that actually invented Bit Torrent, but it also might've been a spin-off. I can visualise the website in my head but I can't place the name!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BTJunkie

They will be missed.. so much nostalgia. Of the old big ones only The Pirate Bay still stands.

As it is, if you were to [edit:actually link] the list of sites you currently support I'm certain your project would draw some unwanted attention!