What is the difference between a bittorrent search engine, google, and yahoo?

[SilasG]

http://torrentfreak.com/u-s-government-seizes-bittorrent-search-engine-domain-and-more-101126/
Spock, I'm aware of how bittorrent works. Most people reading this are too.

But the site the government actually took down wasn't seeding any torrents at all.
... you know what, I can understand people not wanting to click a link though. I usually don't want to.

The headline on the page I'm linking to reads "U.S. Government Seizes BitTorrent Search Engine Domain and More"

[Iranian]

To those who are afraid to click on the link. Read:


While complex, it’s still possible for U.S. authorities and copyright groups to point at a fully-fledged BitTorrent site with a tracker and say “that’s an infringing site.” When one looks at a site which hosts torrents but operates no tracker, the finger pointing becomes quite a bit more difficult.

When a site has no tracker, carries no torrents, lists no copyright works unless someone searches for them and responds just like Google, accusing it of infringement becomes somewhat of a minefield – unless you’re ICE Homeland Security Investigations that is.

This morning, visitors to the Torrent-Finder.com site are greeted with an ominous graphic which indicates that ICE have seized the site’s domain.

“My domain has been seized without any previous complaint or notice from any court!” the exasperated owner of Torrent-Finder told TorrentFreak this morning.

“I firstly had DNS downtime. While I was contacting GoDaddy I noticed the DNS had changed. Godaddy had no idea what was going on and until now they do not understand the situation and they say it was totally from ICANN,” he explained.

Aside from the fact that domains are being seized seemingly at will, there is a very serious problem with the action against Torrent-Finder. Not only does the site not host or even link to any torrents whatsoever, it actually only returns searches through embedded iframes which display other sites that are not under the control of the Torrent-Finder owner.

Torrent-Finder remains operational through another URL, Torrent-Finder.info, so feel free to check it out for yourself. The layouts of the sites it searches are clearly visible in the results shown.

Yesterday we reported that the domain of hiphop site RapGodFathers had been seized and today we can reveal that they are not on their own. Two other music sites in the same field – OnSmash.com and DaJaz1.com – have fallen to the same fate. But ICE activities don’t end there.

Several other domains also appear to have been seized including 2009jerseys.com, nfljerseysupply.com, throwbackguy.com, cartoon77.com, lifetimereplicas.com, handbag9.com, handbagcom.com and dvdprostore.com.

All seized sites point to the same message.

Domain seizures coming under the much debated ‘censorship bill’ COICA? Who needs it?

Update: Below is an longer list of domains that were apparently seized. Most of the sites relate to counterfeit goods. We assume that the authorities had a proper warrant for these sites (as they had for RapGodFathers yesterday), but were unable to confirm this.

Update: A spokeswoman for ICE confirmed the seizures in the following statement. “ICE office of Homeland Security Investigations executed court-ordered seizure warrants against a number of domain names. As this is an ongoing investigation, there are no additional details available at this time.”

[Rick]

Google and yahoo are the major search engine In which you would use to locate p2p sharing sites.
people may argue that a torrent site is illegal,When in fact that's not entirely true.Since some torrents are considered public information.There are more than just music and movies that can be downloaded from using torrent site.

[Spocktrhpt]

bit torrent is not a search engine. it is file distribution software. bit torrent works by both downloading and uploading at the same time from user computers thus bypassing the inherent problems of insufficient server capacity for very popular downloads [EVE Online expansion to be released tomorrow, for example -- they have over 100,000 registered users who'll need it and its about 45 mb in size].

it works like this -- user A gets a download started from the central bit torrent server. a bit later, user B asks for the same thing, so bit torrent gets user A's computer to start the download -- which saves server cycles and clog on the main server. User C might get part of the file from user A, user B, and the central server, etc.

[BillHicks]

Torrent sites are used for p2p ( peer to peer ) file sharing. The others are just regular search engines.