Nathan CrauseMusings of a Software Developer

As anyone who's ever tried to search for torrents will know, it's a bit of swing-and-miss. You're typically stuck with trying to sift through links which are simply ads for pay services (as you would find using isohunt) or extremely slow searches (as you would find using the venerable piratebay).

So what's a person to do? Thankfully, I discovered picktorrent.com, yet another free search engine for torrents. However, there's some distinct benefits I've discovered thus far.

First of all, it's fast. And I mean super-fast. I tried what I consider to be an obscure search (for old software of which I do already have a legal boxed version), and I had a list of results within 2-3 seconds. Considering Canadian residential bandwidth isn't known for being on the cutting edge, this was a real surprise for me.

Second, and perhaps most significant, is that the results always have at least one active seed. Picktorrent's main hook is "only live torrents", which means no torrents are listed where there are no seeds, something which has always driven me bonkers with literally every other torrent search engine I've ever used.

Third, the interface is very clean. Many of the other torrent search engines seem to make you jump through several pages simply to get to the download link, and often even making that link not overly visible (take a look at torrentz.com to see an example of a messy interface). By contrast, with picktorrent.com you click on the search result you want, you go to an info page with a giant "DOWNLOAD TORRENT" link that you could only miss if you weren't even looking at the screen. Absolutely perfect.

After using this service for at least a 1/2 dozen search thus far, I honestly see no need to search anywhere else. I've found everything I've searched for, very quickly, and without any of the mine-fields.