Google BitTorrent site builder
p2pnet news view | P2P:- Google has, it seems, decided to lend a powerful helping hand to anyone and everyone who wants to set up their very own BitTorrent site.
And it doesn’t cost a dime. Or a franc. Or a dram. Or a Bhutanese ngultrum. All that’s involved is acquiring a little technical knowledge.
“Run your web applications on Google’s infrastructure,” says Google. “Build apps on the same scalable systems that power Google applications.”
Gee, guys, thanks! 
“V0rtex and TorrentTab are two sites using Google’s resources to search for torrents,” says TorrentFreak.
“On a free account, users of Google’s App Engine can host 500MB data, and serve up to 5 million page views a month,” says the story, going on »»»
This is more than enough for a medium sized BitTorrent site. At the moment it is not possible to upgrade these limits, since paid accounts are not yet available, but this might change in the future.
Both sites are totally ad free, and great resources to search for torrents. V0rtex currently searches 12 BitTorrent sites, including established sites such as Mininova, The Pirate Bay and isoHunt. The site itself has a clean look and feel, and the search results are sortable by date, peers, seeds and more.
TorrentFreak spoke with Reda, the developer of the site, who told us that he started the project to learn how to code. “It was really fun and exciting to learn Python and Javascript/Ajax,” he said. His goal is not to compete with the big players though. Reda hasn’t even bothered to register a domain name for it since it was mainly a learning experience.
This is different for the other BitTorrent meta search engine hosted on Google’s App Engine, which does have its own domain. TorrentTab, which is a project of David Sánchez, is also using Google’s architecture to search for torrents. The site currently searches 10 sites, and presents the search results in tabs using Google Ajax Feed API.
David told TorrentFreak that he initially started the site on his own Internet connection. When the site started to attract more visitors, he had to find an alternative. Google’s App Engine seemed to be a great solution, so he recoded the site in Python and moved it over to Google’s infrastructure.
Unlike some of the other meta-search engines using tabbed search results, TorrentTab isn’t, “merely loading the results from the other sites in a frame,” says Ernesto on Torrentfreak, adding:
“Unfortunately there are no sorting options for the search results, which makes it hard to find the best seeded files, or the latest uploads.
“Although V0rtex and TorrentTab are are not revolutionary in terms of features or functionality, it is great to see that Google is providing a free playground for BitTorrent startups. It’s always good to see some variety.”
Stay tuned.
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TorrentFreak – Google Powered BitTorrent Seach Engines, November 22, 2008
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