BTDigg
Type of site
BitTorrent DHT search engine, magnet links provider
Available inMultilingual, primarily English
URL
RegistrationNot required
LaunchedJanuary 2011; 13 years ago (2011-01)
Current statusOnline
Part of a series on
File sharing
Technologies
Video on demand sites
BitTorrent sites
Academic/scholarly
File sharing networks
P2P clients
Streaming programs
Anonymous file sharing
Development and societal aspects
By country or region
Comparisons

BTDigg is the first Mainline DHT search engine.[2][3][4] It participated in the BitTorrent DHT network, supporting the network and making correspondence between magnet links and a few torrent attributes (name, size, list of files) which are indexed and inserted into a database. For end users, BTDigg provides a full-text database search via a Web interface. The Web part of its search system retrieved proper information by a user's text query. The Web search supported queries in European and Asian languages. The project name was an acronym of BitTorrent Digger (in this context, digger means treasure-hunter).[5] It went offline in June 2016, reportedly due to index spam.[6] The site returned later in 2016 at a dot-com domain, went offline again, and is now online.[7][citation needed] The btdig.com site has its torrent crawler's source code listed on GitHub, dhtcrawler2.

Features

BTDigg was created as a DHT search engine for free content for the BitTorrent network. The web part of the BTDigg search system provides magnet links and partial torrent information (name, list of files, size) from the database. The returned results are based on a user's text query. BTDigg's DHT search engine links two subjects that are partial information from a torrent and a magnet link, similar to the process of linking the content of a web page with a page URL. BTDigg also provides API for third-party applications.[2]

BTDigg Web interface supports English, Russian, Chinese, Portuguese languages. Users can customize search results by choosing proper sort order in the web interface. Additional features are search API, API popularity, plugins for μTorrent and qBittorrent clients, Web browser OpenSearch plugin (for Internet Explorer, Google Chrome). API popularity gives a picture of changing popularity for a torrent in the BitTorrent DHT network.

History of BTDigg

BTDigg was founded by Nina Evseenko in January 2011. The site is also available via the I2P network and Tor. In March–April 2011, several new features were introduced, among them web plugin to search with one click, qBittorrent plugin, showing torrent info-hash as QR code picture, torrent fakes and duplicates detection, and charts of the popular torrents in soft real-time. In 2012, the website started to support SSL connections.[citation needed]

Advantages and disadvantages

BTDigg provides decentralization of torrent index database creation, and the ability to show distributed ratings provided by users via μTorrent.[8] There is no guarantee about content because BTDigg does not analyze nor store content. BTDigg is not a tracker because it does not participate in nor coordinate the BitTorrent swarm. It is not a BitTorrent index because it does not store and does not maintain a static list of torrents.[9][10]

References

  1. ^ BTDigg [@btdigg] (19 February 2015). "We have only two official mirrors of http://t.co/QVBbcAxzpz : http://btdigg.i2p (I2P) and http://t.co/MVMTk9mMre (TOR). Others are not ours" (Tweet). Archived from the original on 9 September 2022. Retrieved 1 December 2022 – via Twitter.
  2. ^ a b Ernesto (23 February 2011). "BTDigg, The First Trackerless Torrent Search Engine". Torrent Freak. Archived from the original on 2 January 2023. Retrieved 15 June 2013.
  3. ^ Anthony, Sebastian (24 February 2011). "BTDigg, The First DHT Trackerless Decentralized Torrent Search Engine". Download Squad. Archived from the original on 27 July 2020. Retrieved 15 June 2013.
  4. ^ "BTDigg: A Trackerless Torrent Search Engine". Make Use of. 27 February 2011. Archived from the original on 14 August 2020. Retrieved 15 June 2013.
  5. ^ "About". BTDigg. Archived from the original on 27 May 2013. Retrieved 15 June 2013.
  6. ^ "BTDigg Shut Down Due to Torrent Spam, For Now - TorrentFreak". TorrentFreak. 11 July 2016. Archived from the original on 23 October 2016. Retrieved 22 October 2016.
  7. ^ "BTDigg Shut Down Due to Torrent Spam, For Now * TorrentFreak". Archived from the original on 23 October 2016. Retrieved 30 November 2022.
  8. ^ Ernesto (29 March 2012). "BTDigg Adds uTorrent Ratings To Search Results". Torrent Freak. Archived from the original on 19 June 2013. Retrieved 15 June 2013.
  9. ^ "About BTDig". Archived from the original on 31 January 2023. Retrieved 27 September 2022.
  10. ^ "BTDigg: App Reviews, Features, Pricing & Download". AlternativeTo. Archived from the original on 27 September 2022. Retrieved 27 September 2022.
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