BTDigg


BTDigg was the first BitTorrent DHT search engine. It participated in the BitTorrent DHT network, supporting the network and making correspondence between magnet links and a few torrent attributes which are indexed and inserted into a database. For end users, BTDigg provides a full-text database search via 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. It went offline in June 2016, reportedly due to index spam. The site returned later in 2016 at a dot-com domain, went offline again and is now online.. The btdig.com site has its torrent crawler's source source listed on Github, .

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 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.
BTDigg Web interface supports English, Russian, 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. 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.
DateMilestone
31 March 2011Web plugin to search with one click
4 April 2011API popularity
9 April 2011qBittorrent plugin
13 April 2011new Web design
19 April 2011showing torrent info-hash as QR code picture
28 April 2011torrent fakes detection
30 April 2011detection of torrent duplicates
12 July 2011charts of the popular torrents in soft real-time
29 July 2011different sort order
16 January 2012supporting SSL connections
27 March 2012showing distributed votes

Advantages and disadvantages

BTDigg provides decentralization of database creation and ability to show distributed ratings being provided by users via μTorrent. There is also no guarantee about content because BTDigg does not analyze and does not store content. BTDigg is not a tracker because it does not share content, does not participate in or coordinate BitTorrent swarm. It is not a BitTorrent Index because it does not store and does not maintain a static list of torrents.