Torrentz Shuts Down, Largest Torrent Meta-Search Engine Says Farewell

For now the site doesn’t have any extra features such as bookmarks, voting or commenting options.

Torrentz Remains Down, But The Clone Wars Are On

Without prior warning, popular meta-search engine Torrentz closed its doors for good last week. While many users were still staring at the farewell message in disbelief, several torrent site operators sprung into action to get their Torrentz clones ready, leveraging the goodwill built by the popular brand.

Mere hours after Torrentz.eu announced its farewell last week, various clones and mirrors juggled into position to take over.

As one of the oldest and largest torrent sites around, Torrentz had an active following of millions of users. This is something a lot of site owners envy, and these people see the demise of Torrentz as an opportunity.

Taking over an established brand is something the torrent community has seen before in recent years.

When isoHunt was shut down by the MPAA, Isohunt.to quickly took its place, and remains one of the most popular torrent sites today. Similarly, YTS.ag and others took over when YIFY was forced to stop, with success.

This week we have seen a flurry of Torrentz clones appear online. These sites hope to pick up where the original site left off, all offering similar meta-search engine functionality while copying the Torrentz look and feel.

As with previous cases, the success of these takeovers relies on getting a healthy number of eyeballs. Promotion on social media helps, as does a viral Reddit thread and news coverage.

Some clone operators are even willing to pay hard cash to get covered, as we’ve experienced first hand. A few days ago TorrentFreak received an offer to do a “paid” news article. This is something we would never do of course, but it shows that this is a serious business.

So who are these clones? Without endorsing any site, or falsely claiming that “Torrentz is back” as other news outlets have done, here are some of the alternatives we’ve encountered.

Torrentz2.eu has been widely reported as a Torrentz alternative and the site itself bills itself as an upgrade. With a massive 63 sites in their index, with a total of 59,658,880 torrents, it certainly has a wide coverage.

For now the site doesn’t have any extra features such as bookmarks, voting or commenting options.

Torrentz.ec is another clone that popped up this week. The site has a more modest index than Torrentz2.eu but still covers 25 sites, good for a total 27,508,811 active torrents.

The voting functionality appears to work too, but users are not able to log in, at least when we checked. Interestingly, the site claims to index more torrents and sites on its help page, but perhaps the frontpage still has some catching up to do.

Torrentzeu.to is another clone but unlike the other sites it doesn’t advertise itself as such. Instead, the number of indexed sites and torrents mentioned on the frontpage are just copied from the original site.

The above are just a few examples. It’s not our goal to give a complete overview, but it’s clear that several sites are in the race to become the next ‘Torrentz.’

In a way, it is sad to see others taking over the ‘goodwill’ that a site like Torrentz took years to establish. However, judging from public responses, many people don’t care about these sentiments as long as they can get their torrents.

The question that remains, however, is how resilient and trustworthy these new sites are.

Some site owners may have good intentions, but there are also plenty of scammers, phishing for credit card details, or serving malicious content. As is often the case with torrent sites, money is a big motivator for those people.

Time will tell if and to what degree this applies to the clones that have emerged over the past days.

Tagged In:

• torrentz
• torrentz clones
• torrrentz alternatives

Torrentz Shuts Down, Largest Torrent Meta-Search Engine Says Farewell

Torrentz.eu, one of the world’s largest torrent sites, has announced “farewell” to its millions of users. The meta-search engine, which hosted no torrents of its own but linked to other sites including The Pirate Bay, has decided to cease its operation. The surprise shutdown marks the end of an era.

Founded in 2003, Torrentz has been a stable factor in the torrent community for over 13 years.

With millions of visitors per day the site grew out to become one of the most visited torrent sites, but today this reign ends, as the popular meta-search engine has announced its shutdown.

A few hours ago and without warning, Torrentz disabled its search functionality. At first sight the main page looks normal but those who try to find links to torrents will notice that they’re no longer there.

Instead, the site is now referring to itself in the past tense, suggesting that after more than a decade the end has arrived.

“Torrentz was a free, fast and powerful meta-search engine combining results from dozens of search engines,” the text reads.

The site’s user are no longer able to login either. Instead, they see the following message: “Torrentz will always love you. Farewell.”

Torrentz.eu says farewell

TorrentFreak was contacted by one of the operators of Torrentz earlier today, who prefers not to comment at the moment. It’s clear, however, that another major torrent site is shutting down, leaving a gaping hole.

Torrentz itself never hosted any torrent files but did have a takedown procedure in place, allowing copyright holders to take down infringing links.

Not all rightsholders were happy with the site though. Both RIAA and MPAA have reported the site to the U.S. Government in recent years, which repeatedly placed it in its annual “Out-of-Cycle Review of Notorious Markets.”

With Torrentz.eu and KickassTorrents both shutting down, the torrent comunity lost two of the largest sites in a period of three weeks. This means that millions of users will have to find new homes.

Founded a few weeks before The Pirate Bay, Torrentz was one of the oldest torrent sites still around. When Torrentz first came online the site was hosting torrent files, but it swiftly reinvented itself as a meta-search engine, the biggest of its kind.

Breaking story, more updates will follow