YouTorrent relaunches with focus on legal downloads

One of the fastest-growing new BitTorrent sites said late Wednesday that it had relaunched its search engine, indexing nearly six terabytes of legal content.

In April, the site made the decision to go legal and stop indexing sites such as The Pirate Bay and isoHunt, which do not prune their databases of pirated content. YouTube has only been online since January, but the company said at the switch it averaged over 10 million unique users a month.

It had attempted to find a buyer along with the switch, although a deal to do so was never reached. The site says it is owned by Manzanita Assets Ltd., although no further details have been given on the organization.

Administrators did admit to the blog TorrentFreak that the decision ultimately caused the site to lose a large portion of its traffic. However, that has since stabilized and has begun to increase once more.

The site's sources for torrents now include those who verify their contents, including Vuze, BitTorrent, Legaltorrents, and Mininova's featured torrents, among others. This would essentially ensure what YouTorrent is linking to is indeed legal, and help them to avoid the pitfalls of other BitTorrent sites.

Some 67,170 torrents have been indexed across a variety of mediums, including music, video, games, software, and books. Although we used only cursory searches, BetaNews' attempts to generate results containing commercial content did not result in any entries returned.

This is not the end of the changes to the site, however. "YouTorrent plans to expand its operation by launching a full content distribution centre, allowing artists and developers to upload and track their legal content," site admins told BetaNews in an e-mailed statement.