Searching for Torrents (Popular Torrent Search Sites)

Introduction

There is a great deal of content available in bittorrent.  There is over a PetaByte of content available in  3 milliion plus active torrents.  Finding the content you want within all that is what these torrent search sites are about.

If you do not know what bittorrent is, see What is Bittorrent?.   The first step is getting a bittorrent client and setting it up properly (Best Free Bittorrent Client).  The next step is finding the content you want, which this article hopes to help with.

This article lists public torrent search sites, which do not require registration.  There are many private torrent search sites.  The best place to look for information on those is the articles at  FileShareFreak .

Used properly, bittorrent is one of the safest ways to transfer content.  The torrent file contains metadata about the files to be shared and the bittorrent client checks content received against this metadata.  If there is any difference, the content received will be discarded.  This means that malware cannot be added to a torrent after it is active and that any data that is damaged in transmission will be discarded and re-downloaded.

Torrent Search Site Features

There are two features of these sites that will be discussed here.  Comments and Ratings help avoid fakes and scams.  Sorting helps to find the healthiest torrent for the exact content you want.  All of these sites have features to show the files the torrent contains.  Many of these sites have ads, but none are overwhelming and none have popups.  Sites without ads will be noted in their description.

Comments and Ratings
To avoid malware, fakes and scams in torrents only download torrents where the comments or ratings indicate the content associated with the torrent is clean and real.  As stated above, the content associated with a torrent can not be altered once it is active.  So the comments and ratings can be relied upon to find a good torrent.  Each torrent has a unique ID called an Info Hash.  This Info Hash can also be used to find information on the torrent.

Sorting
Sorting is used primarily to find the healthiest torrents.  There is no way to know for certain which torrent is faster as the download speed depends on the upload capacity off the other users.  The best indicator is the seed to peer ratio on the torrent.  The higher that ratio, the more likely it is that the torrent will be faster.  For more info on this, see Good Torrents.   Sorting by seeds, peers (leeches) or "health" is helpful for this. (personally I find the "health" sorting to be somewhat inaccurate and prefer sorting by seed numbers)
Sorting can also be helpful to find the exact content you want, which is where sorting by date, name, size and category can be helpful.

Torrent Search Site Listings:  Popular and Unique

This listing is divided into two parts.  The Popular listing is of the sites that are used by many people.  These sites have large listings of torrents and good comments and ratings systems along with various sorting features.  Most of the time, you will find the content you are looking for at these sites.   The Unique sites are less popular, but have unique features that make them worth using in certain searches.

Warning:  Although each of these sites has legally distributable content, they also contain a good deal of copyrighted content which is not legally distributable.  While bittorrent file sharing technology is legal, the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted content is not.  Obtaining copyrighted content through bittorrent may result in civil and/or criminal legal actions.  This may result in fines of many thousands of dollars per download.

Popular Torrent Search Sites

These are sorted by my preference.

isoHunt.com  is a comprehensive torrent search site and lists over 1.5 million torrents from its own trackers and other trackers. These torrents contain over a petabyte of content.  isoHunt is a comprehensive search engine that lists torrents from many trackers.  Because off this, they can not remove "bad" torrents.  Comments and ratings should be used to avoid these.
Comments and Ratings:  isoHunt has comments and ratings which are well used.    A user can  either "Flag" a torrent (bad) or give Thanks (good).  These ratings will show up in searches as -1 (flag) or +1 (thanks).  Comments can also be made and the number of comments is also indicated in the search results.  There is also a feature to search for comments on the torrent elsewhere and to Google search the Info Hash to find information elsewhere.
Sorting:  by seeds, leechers, category, age, size and name (tags).

btjunkie.org is another comprehensive search engine that lists over 3 million torrents from its own trackers and other trackers.  It also lists torrents from a large number of private trackers, which can be good or bad.  The private torrents are indicated by a lock image on the search results.  Again, "bad" torrents are  not removed and comments and ratings should be used.
Comments and Ratings:  are very well used  and the amount of them is indicated on the search results.  Users can verify a torrent to be clean and real or tag it as fake, virus, password or low quality.
Sorting:  by seeds, leeches, health, size, date, name, age and category.

Torrentz is another comprehensive search engine that lists over 2.6 million torrents and has 55,000 torrents that have been verified to be clean.  Torrentz also has the nice feature of listing all trackers for a torrent, not just the ones embedded in the torrent file.  These trackers can be added in to the torrent active in your bittorrent client and will most likely speed up your download.  They also have cloud search of the more popular search terms.
Comments and Ratings:  are well used.  Users can verify a torrent to be clean and real or tag it as fake, virus, password or low quality.
Sorting:  Torrents may be sorted by name, date created, size or number of  peers (seeds and peers/leeches combined)

ThePirateBay.org  is the world's largest bittorrent tracker with over 1.7 million torrents.
Comments and Ratings:   comments and quality ratings are available.  I find that most times the comments are not well used ("please seed" requests etc) and the quality ratings are not used much.  They do have user classes, which are a good help in finding clean and real torrents.
Sorting:  by seeds, leechers, name, category, size and date added.

Unique Torrent Search Sites

Vertor   has the unique feature of only listing torrents that are verified to be clean and password free and downloadable in full.  They presently list almost 230,000 working, verfied torrents.  This is an ad free site.  For more information on its features, see FileShareFreak.
Comments and Ratings:   Comments are available, but since all torrents are verified they are not much used.
Sorting:  by seeds, leeches, date, category, size and description.

Podtropolis lists only iPod compatible content.  I could not find statistics, but there appears to be a good amount of content listed (although certainly less than the popular sites above).
Comments and Ratings:  comments and ratings are available and seem to be well used.
Sorting:  None

Coda.fm is a music albums bittorrent site.  There is a good deal of information on the artists and albums.  All listings are verified to be clean and real.  If you are looking for a public, music only, bittorrent site, then this is the place to look.  It is an ad free site.  The amount of listings is still quite small, being in the thousands.
Comments and Ratings:  available, but rarely used as listings are verified.
Sorting:  Their unique search results and limited listings do not allow for sorting and it is not needed.

Between the four popular sites above, one should be able to find just about any content wanted.  For the hard to find items meta search sites like these might be helpful

Torrent ZEN   They cull results from eighteen torrent search sites (including all of the above popular sites) and list all the results.   Clicking on a search result takes you to the originating site.  This is an ad free site.
Comments and Ratings:   Since the results take you to the originating site, there is no comments or ratings available here. 
Sorting:  by seeds, peers, search engine, size, title and health.

Torrent-Finder Their engine searches 146 torrent search sites.  The results take you directly to the sites, which you choose by clicking on the icons above the results.  Also there is an option to choose which sites to search before the search.  There are some ads here.
Comments and Ratings:  Because the results shown are directly from other sites, there are none here.
Sorting:  Again, there are none as the results are shown directly from the other sites

All of these sites have received a green rating from WOT (Web Of Trust). 
This is not a comprehensive list, but rather a starting point for new users that should meet their needs. 

Related Articles:

• Finding Legal (and Free) Torrents.
• Best Free Bittorrent Client
• What is Bittorrent?

If you have any questions, comments or sites, please feel free to post here or in Gizmo's Freeware Forums.