21 ms·

Show HN: Privacy-focused, ad-free, non-tracking torrent search engine

1183 points by kasumis_ 10y ago

zensavona 10y ago
Awesome, love it. What a change from ad infested torrent search engines... Also, it's FAST! Does it by chance use Elixir/Erlang?
- kasumis_ 10y ago
  No Erlang plz, Only C
  - vortico 10y ago
    I like this way of thinking.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
nopit 10y ago
The torrents still contain unencrypted http tracker urls, no thanks.
- eltoozero 10y ago
  Use a hosted seedbox then? For many people this isn't really a problem, seedbox or not. For others it's not exactly their problem but yea someone upstream may get a "letter".
- beardog 10y ago
  Most if not all relatively modern clients support DHT and other peer locating methods. Just copy the info hash on the torrent results page & paste into your client. HTTP trackers help find peers who are more firewalled I believe, and also potentially speed up the start of downloads.
middleclick 10y ago
I see that you are based out of India. How do you plan on dealing with law enforcement issues? (Great site, btw).
- kasumis_ 10y ago
  Hosting a torrent site is completely LEGAL. Since we are acting just like google "a search engine".
  - rebuilder 10y ago
    Do you have legal precedent on this? That defense hasn't held in many jurisdictions.
  - antihero 10y ago
    True or not, quite a lot of sites have said this and now no longer exist.
  - middleclick 10y ago
    Well that hasn't worked out well for other sites so that is why I was curious as to how you will handle this differently.
krisgenre 10y ago
Wow! its super fast and NO Javascript!!! Where are you hosting it and do you plan to monetize?
- kasumis_ 10y ago
  No, we DONOT have any plans to monetize. NO javscript was a design feature for security focused users. We also DONOT place any cookies (and donot track). We wanted users to experience a fastest experience possible without worry about adblocks, noscripts etc.
  - beardog 10y ago
    On behalf of all NoScript users, I thank you :)
  - krisgenre 10y ago
    we DONOT have any plans to monetize So my next question is - any plans on open sourcing? :)
    - kasumis_ 10y ago
      We donot have plans on open sourcing soon, but we love open-source. Making it open-source will be considered in future for sure.
      - zyxzkz 10y ago
        You should consider open sourcing the static pages/text at least, so people can improve paragraphing, punctuation, and grammar/spell correct: "donot" should be "do not" (separate words) "atleast" should be "at least" (separate words) I realize English is probably not your first language, so no big deal, but it would be nice to fix.
        TeMPOraL 10y ago
        Since authors seem to like to make feature requests vote-based here, I second this motion!
beardog 10y ago
Decent search engine. I'll keep this in mind if torrentz2.eu goes down. Maybe consider supporting an alternate way to access your website as a Tor onion service too?
- kasumis_ 10y ago
  Definitely will setup a tor onion service ASAP.
  - beardog 10y ago
    Great, thanks. Not only is this more secure & anonymous for your users, but it also gives them a way to access your site in case your main domain is lost or revoked.
jzelinskie 10y ago
Thank you for working on this project. What is your indexing strategy? Similar search engines have a warning that you should use a VPN when downloading that I think would benefit users.
- kasumis_ 10y ago
  We have written up a DHT crawler to locate trackers.We are not dependant on trackers. We are also testing an AI based detector which filters out FAKE torrents (it is not currently deployed, but we test it). If 2 more users here demand a VPN warning, it will be deployed.
  - hkjgkjy 10y ago
    How is this "If 2 or more users demand <x feature>, it will be done" policy working for you? Have you used it in other projects prior to this? Curious to hear any stories :).
    - kasumis_ 10y ago
      It's working fine. We are gathering feedback what users want and then do the development instead of we will develop this whether user want it or not. A company once invested more than an year developing a feature, which was rolled back in 1 day after users complained.
      - hkjgkjy 10y ago
        > A company once invested more than an year developing a feature, which was rolled back in 1 day after users complained. Hah! I know that all too well. Great work!
      - alimbada 10y ago
        Requiring only 3 users to vote for a feature seems quite low to me.
diegorbaquero 10y ago
Will you offer any type of API? I'd be interested
- hebelehubele 10y ago
  An RSS feed for searches would be great as well
  - kasumis_ 10y ago
    RSS feed for searches is already present, after you search you will have an RSS icon for that specific search
- kasumis_ 10y ago
  What sort of API, please elaborate ?
  - truftruf 10y ago
    If the search results had complete JSON responses with all the data (info/magnet, number of peers, ...) that would be really nice. https://www.skytorrents.in/search/all/ed/1/?q=ubuntu+iso&format=json https://www.skytorrents.in/search/all/ed/1/?q=ubuntu+iso&for... I don't know if there's a better way, like including all that data in the RSS feed somehow. Otherwise one would have to scrape the HTML to get that data, which would be less reliable.
  - baddymaster 10y ago
    Similar to what @truftruf said. You could probably build something similar to RARBG's API (https://torrentapi.org/apidocs_v2.txt https://torrentapi.org/apidocs_v2.txt). I find it to be immensely useful.
karthikp 10y ago
That site served blazingly fast. It's refreshing to see an ad free torrent site. Since you aren't monetizing the site, how are you planning on keeping the site running? Donations?
- happy-go-lucky 10y ago
  It's very fast. Currently they're NOT accepting donations. https://www.skytorrents.in/howto https://www.skytorrents.in/howto
- lelandbatey 10y ago
  Given the relatively slim page size (23Kb for me), and given that SQLite can pretty easily host a relatively simple database like this one and serve 100K-1M queries per day[0], I would expect that whoever is hosting this could pretty easily host this on a single dedicated server which only costs ~$50. So for the foreseeable future, I suspect this site will be fine. [0] - https://sqlite.org/whentouse.html https://sqlite.org/whentouse.html
  - kasumis_ 10y ago
    SQLITE cannot handle indexing queries of our kind and is not used. We have kept the page slim, so as the website is as fast as possible.
    - karthikp 10y ago
      If you don't mind me asking, what technologies are you using?
      - chippy 10y ago
        It appears to be using Caddy at least https://caddyserver.com/ https://caddyserver.com/
        kasumis_ 10y ago
dbg31415 10y ago
I always wish torrent sites used some sort of data table widget to allow for easier sorting of the search results. Something like this would work great (there may be better ones still): https://www.datatables.net/examples/styling/bootstrap4.html https://www.datatables.net/examples/styling/bootstrap4.html
- kasumis_ 10y ago
  It was considered, but this feature required javascript. Since javascript was not a option, it was discarded.If there is some other way without scripting, please let us know. It will be used and implemented.
  - leesalminen 10y ago
    It's tedious but can be accomplished with server side sorting. You could have: <th> <a href="/search?sort=name&direction=asc"> Name <a> </th> The server side code would interpret the sort and direction parameters and sort results as instructed.
    - kasumis_ 10y ago
      Server side sorting is already being done :)
      - quasiuna 10y ago
        On the issue of sorting, it should be labelled ASC for Ascending, not AESC. That's the only fault I can find...
        kasumis_ 10y ago
        will be fixed
CaptSpify 10y ago
Don't you realize that you can't build a usable site without mountains of JS and user-tracking scripts? /sarcasm It's really refreshing to see a fast, small efficient site that gets rid of all the bullshit. Congrats!
- disiplus 10y ago
  with all free services it starts this way ( look at imgur and so on. ) and eventually ends in ads ridden monster. but we usually end up in a couple of years great service, before they figure out that they could be earning money with serving ads or selling data.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    Let's be grateful for what we have now. The cycle is usually completed by another free service starting and being usable for the next few years, and in this case there's no pain in switching (no content you uploaded and spread URLs to), so I wouldn't worry. On the other hand, in the age of HTML "hello world" including an Angular installation, downloading Bootstrap from external CDN, and at least three different kind of tracking scripts, I think sites like this one need to be praised loudly.
  - Fnoord 10y ago
    I never see any banners on Imgur. I block banners. What Extratorrents and The Pirate Bay do tho seems to be something akin to clickjacking. I click on a link to a torrent search result (or a download link), a tab opens, and it immediately closes. Rest assured this generates them money.
    - ErikDub 10y ago
      That is your adblocker closing the popup as soon as it opens. For users without an adblocker the tab stays open.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  Yes! At first I literally couldn't believe what I was seeing - ZERO third-party bullshit in uMatrix. Not just none to unblock to make the site work - none at all! (Apparently you can make a website without downloading Bootstrap from someone's external CDN...) And then... oh my God, how fast the site is. I can actually feel I have a somewhat modern, powerful computer. Usual day-to-day browsing makes me forget that. So yeah, for this reason alone I'll be using and recommending this site. Great job!
pratikborsadiya 10y ago
https://github.com/you-dont-need/You-Dont-Need-Javascript https://github.com/you-dont-need/You-Dont-Need-Javascript Here is a good collection of web-components which can be implemented without using JavaScript. Hope it helps you guys in developing the site. All the best.
- omtinez 10y ago
  Thanks for sharing that! Some of them are just a big pile of CSS which I don't know if it's a better option than JavaScript... But others were pure gold and a very clever use of HTML (like the carousel)
carbonmachine 10y ago
The top 1000 has a lot of software. The thought of running pirated software always filled me with unease, having been burned by malware in my younger days. Only tangentially related to this really well done torrent search (so snappy!), but does anyone have a feel for how safe this software is in general? Do security firms do any analysis on it?
- kasumis_ 10y ago
  We have an AI based differentiater which detects fake or malware infested torrents. However, since this is alpha state and is used sometimes. Once we are satisfied, it will be deployed. We still have deployed different mechanism to detect and fake torrents. There is also Voting and commenting for the community
- BinaryIdiot 10y ago
  Growing up I heard horror stories of people pirating versions of Windows, Office, etc that had backdoors installed. If you download pirated software there isn't a real way to know for 100% certainty that it isn't laced with something. So I avoid it like the plague. Even if the majority don't have anything it only takes the one and then, depending on its level of sophistication, you're screwed.
  - IceyEC 10y ago
    With some things you can get a hash of an iso from the true source and compares that to the downloaded iso
  - y4mi 10y ago
    i think we can be quite certain that there are backdoors into windows also without it being pirated, so your phrasing makes it easy to argue back. i'd personally argue with the backdoors hidden by the pirates are significantly more likely to be used for nefarious things than the 'official' ones, as whitehats are responsible for the former, while blackhats created the latter.
  - slg 10y ago
    My favorite was all the pirated copies of Windows 10 that were floating around that supposedly had the telemetry features removed. It always confused me who exactly those were targeting.
yakult 10y ago
Suggestion: get rid of the torrent files and just serve magnet urls in plain text without a clickable button. This way you get rid of the knowledge of who-downloaded-what, and also save some bandwidth.
- kasumis_ 10y ago
  If 2 more users recommend this, it will be done.
  - pizza 10y ago
    do this
    - kasumis_ 10y ago
      It will be done soon, thanks for voting.
  - arthurcolle 10y ago
    What's the intent/desire for you to be on the delivering end of serving .torrent files?
    - kasumis_ 10y ago
      There is no intent, it's just there as many people still prefer torrent file. Though we have magnet links, so security focused users can download without us knowing nothing.
    - Fnoord 10y ago
      Tangible/easy mirroring of the torrent database? Then again, DHT wouldn't go down.
  - leetbulb 10y ago
    i recommend this
  - repomies691 10y ago
sfilargi 10y ago
Ridiculously fast! Would love to hear about your stack. C, what else? What database, template library?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
pastaking 10y ago
Great site! What inspired you to create this and how will you afford to keep it running?
- kasumis_ 10y ago
  Too many ads and sloppy search. It will be kept running from our own pockets. If we run out of money,we may make it open-source or request donations.
royka118 10y ago
I like it!!
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
rnhmjoj 10y ago
Is there something like this I can run on my computer (or self-host)?
ecesena 10y ago
Suggestion: when searching for TV series, I'd try to sort results by decreasing season/episode (SnnExx), or at least simply by time.
sairamkunala 10y ago
wow Super fast. Interested to know the tech stack. I saw Caddy as the frontend server with https. and you use "C" below.
jordsta 10y ago
Uh, could purely be a coincidence but the favicon looks identical to the logo of UK TV corporation Sky (albeit with less colour): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sky_plc_logo.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sky_plc_logo.png
- slg 10y ago
  Are you really complaining that a site that is dedicated to copyright infringement might be misusing a trademark? I have a feeling that is the least of their legal concerns.
  - DanBC 10y ago
    Trademark law is pretty fierce, and sites like these should generally want to minimise the legal attack surface.
    - 6stringmerc 10y ago
      Never underestimate the allure of digital heroism. I get a similar vibe as Aurous with this one. For profit or not it'll bear the brunt of an angry industry.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- simooooo 10y ago
  Sky TV will be on it in no time
- simonjgreen 10y ago
  And now it's changed to something that looks rapidly scratched down in paint :D
amazon_not 10y ago
Search works incorrectly. +WORD1 +WORD2 returns WORD1 OR WORD2 instead of empty set if there is no match.
ghoshbishakh 10y ago
Firefox says 'your connection is insecure' and I need to add a security exception. Don't know why.
- kasumis_ 10y ago
  Our certificates are valid. Please verify at your end.
- jpwagner 10y ago
  this is very likely related to letsencrypt certs used with certain firefox versions
joe563323 10y ago
What is the business model ?
- kome 10y ago
  There is no business model hopefully. And it's really great!
sunny1304 10y ago
liked it.
DeepYogurt 10y ago
I applaud the effort, but what's the model for making money? Are you just self funding this?
awalGarg 10y ago
Asking purely out of curiosity: Are you actually based in India? (The domain is on the Indian TLD and the address in whois records lists an Indian city). Here in India, cyber law enforcement is a joke, and if some legal issue comes up with this site, I'd be curious to see how it works out. And, just a hypothetical follow up question: how would it work out if the site was not even DMCA compliant?
- satbyy 10y ago
  I'm not associated with it, but yeah, it was posted in /r/india few days ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/5mj3vz/setting_up_new_torrent_search_engine_ad_free_more/ https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/5mj3vz/setting_up_ne... Domain is from Gandi (France) and IP address (hosting?) seems to be from Netherlands
rz2k 10y ago
I think this a great idea. I looked up things like Tor Browser, Tails, and a few Linux distributions and popular open source projects. I found all of them far more quickly than I could have by going to their respective sites. Then I thought I probably shouldn't do that without promising myself to always verify the hashes, even if this site lets me start the download faster.
platinumm 10y ago
Thanks , for such search engine,that really includes no javascript and no cookies in any form. Secondly Its amazingly fast, I believe its more than just C language. I tried different combinations of searches on your search engine to check whether results are being served from cache or so. And it looks all searches(don't know your cache/uncache db design) are several times faster comparable to many. + +1 for speed. Also i feel i found a minor bug. Even though it looks passion project but don't know how long will you survive fighting DMCA ,others, costs without monetizing plans or accepting donations. Won't mind donation if you accept. Till you survive, i am glad for your engine.
- kasumis_ 10y ago
  Please file the bug on the email address mentioned on the website.
naklers 10y ago
Question: How to use metadata info in the search? e.g. "2016" or "1080p" Or only the titles are indexed?
Fnoord 10y ago
Perhaps show the NFO, or parse link to IMDB from NFO and link to that? You can also scrape NFOs to make genres and type of media (games, applications, audio, video, and subgenres of these).
jimparkins 10y ago
Hi, Love the site especially the speed. But disappointed that the search indexes the name of the container of the torrent only and not the name of the files within the torrent. To date the only site I know that does this is "filelisting dot com" but their website is very slow. Do you have any plans to extend your product to add this feature. Maybe as a premium option? Super useful to find single documents contained within archived bundles of files.
- kasumis_ 10y ago
  If 3 more users vote this feature, It will be provided for free to everyone and it will provided at the same speeds as the current website.
  - hncommenter_ 10y ago
    Add my vote too. Thanks for your great work!
  - gbtxg 10y ago
    Kindly add my vote too, for this feature.
  - m3Lith 10y ago
    You get my +1.
  - pps 10y ago
    Yes, please.
  - a1371 10y ago
    Have my vote please as well.
  - leonix 10y ago
    Indexing individual files is surely a great feature. Voting for it, too.
  - bbotond 10y ago
atmosx 10y ago
This one is hosted using caddy[1]. I wonder what's the backed stack is. The server is hosted on NFOrce, in Netherlands[2]. Interesting. I wonder if we could get some sort of canary. The PGP-only mail policy is very interesting, I wonder if it will actually work even for DMC-related emails. [1] https://caddyserver.com/ https://caddyserver.com/ [2] https://www.nforce.com/about https://www.nforce.com/about
adgasf 10y ago
Amazing work; the site is extremely responsive!
throwaway987321 10y ago
Where can I safely download torrents from? A server in Switzerland seems the best option I've found, but wondering about Russia too. Payment would need to be in bitcoin to avoid handing over payment details.
ssreeniv 10y ago
Nice work! How recent are the search results and how frequently do they get updated?
- kasumis_ 10y ago
  Search results are continuously updated, search results are as recent upto last second.
hkjgkjy 10y ago
It'd be nice if I could self-host it, or have it run behind a TOR hidden service.
corv 10y ago
A useful addition would be to categorize the top 1000 based on file name extension.
jon-wood 10y ago
What's the chance of this getting a simple API which can be fed into flexget or similar?
- kasumis_ 10y ago
  are you talking about RSS, it's already there as soon as make a query to feed into flexget.
  - jon-wood 10y ago
    I totally hadn't made that connection, thanks!
abrookewood 10y ago
Looks great and runs quickly. Couple of UI niggles: - The verified & marked icon is way larger than the others and completely throws out the spacing - I find it pretty difficult to tell what page of the results I am on and what pages I have visited - Because of the point above, a Forward/Back button for pages would be handy
vog 10y ago
That's very fast. How much hardware did you have to throw at this? Also, who pays the servers (since you aren't accepting donations)?
Walkman 10y ago
Privacy doesn't matter in case of torrents because as soon as you download one, peers will know who are you.
buro9 10y ago
Suggestions: 1. Enable whois privacy via Gandi 2. Hide your server IPs behind Cloudflare 3. Ensure the site is written such that it is trivial for yourself and others to use alternate domain names
- kasumis_ 10y ago
  no CDNs as it leads to tracking by CDNs.
  - erelde 10y ago
    Close your port 22 at least. Define some simple iptables rules. Only able to login if coming from specific ip address, like a private vpn server.
- StavrosK 10y ago
  Will Cloudflare work for this kind of stuff? I assume you guys comply with DMCA takedowns and things?
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- mulrian 10y ago
  Yeah the whois thing should be done ASAP before you start to take on more users.
- imglorp 10y ago
  Is old whois data cached? If you launch without whois privacy and turn it on later, can someone go back in history and still find the registrant? As a side note, maybe someone like archive.org should keep time series whois data...
  - sk7 10y ago
    > can someone go back in history and still find the registrant? Yes, there are some services which offer this, e.g.: http://www.domainhistory.net/skytorrents.in http://www.domainhistory.net/skytorrents.in
dandare 10y ago
add-free, non-tracking, not accepting donations - call me paranoid but unless I know why are you doing this I have to assume the worst. There simply is no free lunch.
achairapart 10y ago
Looks great. Now, does anyone also know any torrent client that work in the cloud?
- aubreykilian 10y ago
  https://put.io/ https://put.io/ ?
vs4vijay 10y ago
Kudos to you, add some categories if possible
misotaur 10y ago
Impressive,I would love to read a blog about the technologies you use.
- Michael_m 10y ago
  Count me also, i too would love to read a blog about your stack and technologies. Cassidy,C,rust,go,postgres,mysql, sphinx,lucene etc. I hope you may have tested many and would like to share your experiences.I can say its not just some off the shelf software you have deployed and bang! you have coded it. And i feel that if you are smart coder you can do wonders. Congratss for your digital heroism ?
_pdp_ 10y ago
SUGGESTION: instead of using a backend to swift through the torrents, why not host an offline JSON, sqlite or whatever (maybe streaming) client-side data format of your choice that contains the entire index. This way the application is not only offline but can be easily hosted and replicated. It will be offline and versioned. If the index is too large, than some splitting will be required but I think this is totally doable.
danielsamuels 10y ago
Not sure if it's a bug, but a common search for '1080p' returns no results (and takes around 10 seconds): https://www.skytorrents.in/search/all/ed/1/?q=1080p https://www.skytorrents.in/search/all/ed/1/?q=1080p
- johnnydoe9 10y ago
  Same with searching '720p'
the8472 10y ago
On a large screen the file list is too small in my opinion. The "Found related results" section takes up 80% of the screen space in comparison.
nemof 10y ago
hey, just a thought, but at some point if this gets too popular you will probably get a message from the UK TV company SKY who wont be super happy about your name.
- aembleton 10y ago
  Or the favicon that looks like it was lifted straight from on old version of their website.
  - nemof 10y ago
    hah yes i hadn't spotted that but now you point it out i realise it was itching the back of my brain.
whocanfly 10y ago
This is blazing fast, congrats! However, I am concerned by the use of IN domain. Indian govtt frequently asks ISPs to block sites to avoid piracy. How do you plan to avoid getting blocked?
- kasumis_ 10y ago
  we only have https version
  - rattray 10y ago
    Will that prevent the GOI (Government of India) from blocking the domain?
    - shadyabhi 10y ago
      Yes, here in India blocking happens on port 80 only. Kind of nice, comply with the requests from the government but don't really block anything for the good of masses.
  - middleclick 10y ago
    Well even PirateBay had that... and they can just block DNS requests to the website. You should probably set up a hidden service on Tor.
    - kasumis_ 10y ago
      TOR service will be put in place soon
leni536 10y ago
I can't get over how fast this site is. Try the site in dillo or netsurf for a blazing fast torrent search experience.
IamHWengineer 10y ago
Love the speed. What's the stack for this?
prashnts 10y ago
You might want to move to some other tld. nic.in has some absurd rules. dnssec and whoisguard are not allowed with it, for example.
thomasdd 10y ago
Quote from FAQ: "Thanks, but currently we are NOT accepting donations." :) so cool.
raldu 10y ago
Notice how they make it difficult and painful to file DMCA complaints: https://www.skytorrents.in/dmca https://www.skytorrents.in/dmca Genius.
- edraferi 10y ago
  Doesn't seem too painful to me. They're basically just asking for an email with all the stuff that's legally required to be in a DMCA notice. Here's what the DMCA requires[1]: (i) A physical or electronic signature of a person authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed. (ii) Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed, or, if multiple copyrighted works at a single online site are covered by a single notification, a representative list of such works at that site. (iii) Identification of the material that is claimed to be infringing or to be the subject of infringing activity and that is to be removed or access to which is to be disabled, and information reasonably sufficient to permit the service provider to locate the material. (iv) Information reasonably sufficient to permit the service provider to contact the complaining party, such as an address, telephone number, and, if available, an electronic mail address at which the complaining party may be contacted. (v) A statement that the complaining party has a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law. (vi) A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed. [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512
- rycho 10y ago
  the fact that DMCA takedowns are applied to services that simply index other parts of the web is completely insane
superquest 10y ago
Add commas to "Serving 11234246 torrents"
aphextron 10y ago
I'm very wary of anything closed which bills itself as privacy focused and "non-tracking". Can you prove these claims openly? Otherwise this is just a public tracker, potentially full of malware and honeypots.
- Eun 10y ago
  Agreed here, the site is using a backend and who knows what this backend is tracking. It should be a static site and open source, so we can verify the claims.
  - kasumis_ 10y ago
    We are planning to put up a tor onion frontend and thus tor users can browse even more anonymously.
jMyles 10y ago
Does anybody have a quick primer on adding security and privacy to the actual participation in the torrent swarm (ie, downloading and seeding)?
caio1982 10y ago
I don't mean to spoil all the fun (this service seems AWESOME, congrats and thank you), but who are you? It also kind of feels too good to be true...
CKFY 10y ago
Hi. I would concur that you guys should get some help with the UI elements. The Verified icon messing up row height aside, on my screen the no. of files column is excessively large, and the size column is too thin that often the unit MB/GB is squeezed down to the second line, which hurts readability.
julius 10y ago
#1 on HackerNews -> [Dynamic Search-Result] Page served in 39µs What kind of dark magic is this? What's your stack?
- philtar 10y ago
  Yeah it's stupidly fast.
- SparkyMcUnicorn 10y ago
  The only thing I see in the headers is that it's using https://caddyserver.com https://caddyserver.com
- etatoby 10y ago
  My guess is that he's using a compiled language such as Rust or Go, with a lightweight non-blocking framework, plus intelligent caching of backend queries, plus a decent backend such as Sphinx or PostgreSQL. Compare with interpreted languages for the frontend and Java monsters as backends (PHP and Lucene anyone?) People forget what modern computers are really capable of, when used properly.
- Michael_m 10y ago
  Yeah. Insanely fast,coders look insane :) /sarcasm
bogomipz 10y ago
This looks great. Nice work. On a privacy related note can anyone recommend a torrent friendly VPN provider? This + vpn would make a great combination. Cheer.
- gurkendoktor 10y ago
  AirVPN works great for me in Europe, usually around 1 MB/s downstream.
myf01d 10y ago
> Page served in 8.759µs kill me plz
franciscop 10y ago
I'm curious if this site is vulnerable to torrent XSS: http://security.stackexchange.com/q/86990/9161 http://security.stackexchange.com/q/86990/9161
spaceheeder 10y ago
Why is "You must identify in sufficient detail the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed." listed three times in your DMCA policy? Does the information actually need to be submitted in triplicate?
- kasumis_ 10y ago
  Fixed
  - spaceheeder 10y ago
    Weird that I still see it (duplicate text hastily underlined with imgur's editing tools)[0]. [0]: http://i.imgur.com/n3VeeSh.png http://i.imgur.com/n3VeeSh.png
    - kasumis_ 10y ago
      Fixed for sure, was pending approval from other members
  - TuringTest 10y ago
    I liked it repeated several times. It sorta made a point. (In fact I thought it was made on purpose).
- logfromblammo 10y ago
  Why not? A triplicated datum gives reasonable certainty that the complainant did not accidentally mis-identify the copyrighted work. The takedown requests are a waste of the complainant's time, anyway. The site does not host any files, and a listing of facts, such as the contents of a telephone book, is not eligible for copyright protections. Such a request is equivalent to a demand to remove someone's telephone number from the telephone book, because if you call it, the voice mail system plays Lionel Ritchie's recording of "Hello". It's ridiculous on its face. If there is nothing to take down, you can make the DMCA request process as burdensome as you like, because your response will always be a brush-off.
jasonjayr 10y ago
A few other folks have mentioned this, but a (monthly?) dump of the database, offered as a torrent link on the site would be fantastic. Not only would it enable offline searching, but when the inevitable take down shows up, folks can still continue to search the database.
- kasumis_ 10y ago
  7 more votes to get it done.
  - pvg 10y ago
    It's really not an auction site. Set up a way to handle feature requests.
    - 6stringmerc 10y ago
      Don't worry, unless they set up a vote to "banish all US Copyright protected works" the inevitable RIAA/MPAA pressure will sort out the project by itself. I'm not delusional to claim Torrents are without legitimate purpose - they are - and I'm also not delusional enough to believe hosts/developers are powerless to address piracy of sorts.
  - ardaozkal 10y ago
    +1
  - etatoby 10y ago
    +1
  - ulam2 10y ago
    +1
  - dshacker 10y ago
    Vote this up!
  - PeCaN 10y ago
bodecker 10y ago
This is fascinating! Any idea how it is implemented? Guessing it's using some open source search engine like Elasticsearch to build the indices/compute relevance in a centralized manner. Would it be possible to leverage the distributed nature of TOR to create a completely P2P/distributed version of this search engine? Relevance features like TF/IDF might be a bit challenging to implement, but it seems like it would be possible!
parito 10y ago
NordVPN is torrent friendly provider, I know many people do use them just in case
rastapasta42 10y ago
I actually was working on a similar project (http://pirategod.org/ http://pirategod.org/) few month ago, but sadly I got a fulltime job so had to abandon the project. Torrent protocol is a brilliant system for information sharing, and with fragmentation of services like Netflix we need to start considering other solutions again, until the industry can give us what we need.
- bruno207 10y ago
  That URL is amazing, I hope you're able to find a use for it in the future.
  - tripzilch 10y ago
    You Wouldn't Download A Deity
UhUhUhUh 10y ago
Elegant! At first I thought there was an error between micro- and milli-seconds. But no... File search would be great indeed!
jiehong 10y ago
Hello, Great speed! But where is the list of torrents retrieved from in the end?
- kasumis_ 10y ago
  It's obtained from the DHT network itself
  - shadyabhi 10y ago
    Are you using a opensource tool to crawl DHT?
    - kasumis_ 10y ago
      NO, closed source
severine 10y ago
If someone knows Python and uses qBittorrent, a search plugin for this site would be great! Instructions here: https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent/wiki/How-to-write-a-search-plugin https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent/wiki/How-to-write...
known 10y ago
Impressed by its speed https://builtwith.com/skytorrents.in https://builtwith.com/skytorrents.in
known 10y ago
Why Netcraft Risk Rating is so high? http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://www.skytorrents.in http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://www.skyto...
- kasumis_ 10y ago
  Because the domain is new. It's mentioned in the http://toolbar.netcraft.com/help/faq/index.html#riskrating http://toolbar.netcraft.com/help/faq/index.html#riskrating
_jomo 10y ago
Ordering by relevance seems to be a bit weird, try searching for "ubuntu server 16.04". Great service otherwise!
_jomo 10y ago
Does DMCA require you to delete URLs with hashes of files when you don't own the content? Also, are you allowed to publish the takedown requests?
alfg 10y ago
Refreshing to see such a fast website without any JS. Really interested in what your tech stack looks like.
newscracker 10y ago
I'd suggest using another TLD or having multiple TLDs to avoid losing it even temporarily (if at all someone decides to take this domain down). The .in TLD policies [1] require a real and accurate address of the registrant, which is not provided for this domain [2]: > Contact information: Registrants must provide true, accurate contact information. The following contact types are required: Registrant, Administrative, Technical, Billing. As per standing policy, the contact data will displayed in the .IN WHOIS, except for the Billing contact data, which is not displayed. [1]: https://registry.in/Policies https://registry.in/Policies [2]: https://registry.in/whois/skytorrents.in https://registry.in/whois/skytorrents.in / http://whois.domaintools.com/skytorrents.in http://whois.domaintools.com/skytorrents.in
mc42 10y ago
This is absolutely incredible, and the load times are incomprehensible for a modern site. What software powers the site? I did some looking and discovered it uses Bulma [1] instead of Bootstrap, and it's absolutely amazing. Another commenter pointed out that the site also uses Caddy for HTTP/2 and HTTPS. Excellent work, keep it up! [1] - http://bulma.io/ http://bulma.io/
leduce 10y ago
It would be fantastic if you had a onion services URL as well.
shadyabhi 10y ago
Any plans on providing search API?
arghwhat 10y ago
I appreciate how well this service is made. It's fast and looks nice without any useless dynamic crap to slow it down. You don't need JavaScript and 200 resources to make a nice page, and it is indeed amazing how fast a page gets when you remove the cruft. Kudos, good sir.
gaunwise 10y ago
This is awesome!!!
0natcer 10y ago
Wish I counld just click on the "Size", "Files", "Added", "SE" and "PE" to order them...
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
lolikoisuru 10y ago
It would be nice to get some sort for ratio of peers to seeders so I could find stuff that needs seeding.
DavideNL 10y ago
great... just needs a black/dark theme :-)

1183 points by kasumis_ 10y ago

Awesome, love it. What a change from ad infested torrent search engines... Also, it's FAST! Does it by chance use Elixir/Erlang?

kasumis_ 10y ago
No Erlang plz, Only C
- vortico 10y ago
  I like this way of thinking.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]

nopit 10y ago

The torrents still contain unencrypted http tracker urls, no thanks.

eltoozero 10y ago
Use a hosted seedbox then? For many people this isn't really a problem, seedbox or not. For others it's not exactly their problem but yea someone upstream may get a "letter".
beardog 10y ago
Most if not all relatively modern clients support DHT and other peer locating methods. Just copy the info hash on the torrent results page & paste into your client. HTTP trackers help find peers who are more firewalled I believe, and also potentially speed up the start of downloads.

middleclick 10y ago

I see that you are based out of India. How do you plan on dealing with law enforcement issues? (Great site, btw).

kasumis_ 10y ago
Hosting a torrent site is completely LEGAL. Since we are acting just like google "a search engine".
- rebuilder 10y ago
  Do you have legal precedent on this? That defense hasn't held in many jurisdictions.
- antihero 10y ago
  True or not, quite a lot of sites have said this and now no longer exist.
- middleclick 10y ago
  Well that hasn't worked out well for other sites so that is why I was curious as to how you will handle this differently.

krisgenre 10y ago

Wow! its super fast and NO Javascript!!! Where are you hosting it and do you plan to monetize?

kasumis_ 10y ago
No, we DONOT have any plans to monetize. NO javscript was a design feature for security focused users. We also DONOT place any cookies (and donot track). We wanted users to experience a fastest experience possible without worry about adblocks, noscripts etc.
- beardog 10y ago
  On behalf of all NoScript users, I thank you :)
- krisgenre 10y ago
  we DONOT have any plans to monetize So my next question is - any plans on open sourcing? :)
  - kasumis_ 10y ago
    We donot have plans on open sourcing soon, but we love open-source. Making it open-source will be considered in future for sure.
    - zyxzkz 10y ago
      You should consider open sourcing the static pages/text at least, so people can improve paragraphing, punctuation, and grammar/spell correct: "donot" should be "do not" (separate words) "atleast" should be "at least" (separate words) I realize English is probably not your first language, so no big deal, but it would be nice to fix.
      - TeMPOraL 10y ago
        Since authors seem to like to make feature requests vote-based here, I second this motion!

beardog 10y ago

Decent search engine. I'll keep this in mind if torrentz2.eu goes down. Maybe consider supporting an alternate way to access your website as a Tor onion service too?

kasumis_ 10y ago
Definitely will setup a tor onion service ASAP.
- beardog 10y ago
  Great, thanks. Not only is this more secure & anonymous for your users, but it also gives them a way to access your site in case your main domain is lost or revoked.

jzelinskie 10y ago

Thank you for working on this project. What is your indexing strategy? Similar search engines have a warning that you should use a VPN when downloading that I think would benefit users.

kasumis_ 10y ago
We have written up a DHT crawler to locate trackers.We are not dependant on trackers. We are also testing an AI based detector which filters out FAKE torrents (it is not currently deployed, but we test it). If 2 more users here demand a VPN warning, it will be deployed.
- hkjgkjy 10y ago
  How is this "If 2 or more users demand <x feature>, it will be done" policy working for you? Have you used it in other projects prior to this? Curious to hear any stories :).
  - kasumis_ 10y ago
    It's working fine. We are gathering feedback what users want and then do the development instead of we will develop this whether user want it or not. A company once invested more than an year developing a feature, which was rolled back in 1 day after users complained.
    - hkjgkjy 10y ago
      > A company once invested more than an year developing a feature, which was rolled back in 1 day after users complained. Hah! I know that all too well. Great work!
    - alimbada 10y ago
      Requiring only 3 users to vote for a feature seems quite low to me.

diegorbaquero 10y ago

Will you offer any type of API? I'd be interested

hebelehubele 10y ago
An RSS feed for searches would be great as well
- kasumis_ 10y ago
  RSS feed for searches is already present, after you search you will have an RSS icon for that specific search
kasumis_ 10y ago
What sort of API, please elaborate ?
- truftruf 10y ago
  If the search results had complete JSON responses with all the data (info/magnet, number of peers, ...) that would be really nice. https://www.skytorrents.in/search/all/ed/1/?q=ubuntu+iso&format=json https://www.skytorrents.in/search/all/ed/1/?q=ubuntu+iso&for... I don't know if there's a better way, like including all that data in the RSS feed somehow. Otherwise one would have to scrape the HTML to get that data, which would be less reliable.
- baddymaster 10y ago
  Similar to what @truftruf said. You could probably build something similar to RARBG's API (https://torrentapi.org/apidocs_v2.txt https://torrentapi.org/apidocs_v2.txt). I find it to be immensely useful.

karthikp 10y ago

That site served blazingly fast. It's refreshing to see an ad free torrent site. Since you aren't monetizing the site, how are you planning on keeping the site running? Donations?

happy-go-lucky 10y ago
It's very fast. Currently they're NOT accepting donations. https://www.skytorrents.in/howto https://www.skytorrents.in/howto
lelandbatey 10y ago
Given the relatively slim page size (23Kb for me), and given that SQLite can pretty easily host a relatively simple database like this one and serve 100K-1M queries per day[0], I would expect that whoever is hosting this could pretty easily host this on a single dedicated server which only costs ~$50. So for the foreseeable future, I suspect this site will be fine. [0] - https://sqlite.org/whentouse.html https://sqlite.org/whentouse.html
- kasumis_ 10y ago
  SQLITE cannot handle indexing queries of our kind and is not used. We have kept the page slim, so as the website is as fast as possible.
  - karthikp 10y ago
    If you don't mind me asking, what technologies are you using?
    - chippy 10y ago
      It appears to be using Caddy at least https://caddyserver.com/ https://caddyserver.com/
      - kasumis_ 10y ago

dbg31415 10y ago

I always wish torrent sites used some sort of data table widget to allow for easier sorting of the search results. Something like this would work great (there may be better ones still): https://www.datatables.net/examples/styling/bootstrap4.html https://www.datatables.net/examples/styling/bootstrap4.html

kasumis_ 10y ago
It was considered, but this feature required javascript. Since javascript was not a option, it was discarded.If there is some other way without scripting, please let us know. It will be used and implemented.
- leesalminen 10y ago
  It's tedious but can be accomplished with server side sorting. You could have: <th> <a href="/search?sort=name&direction=asc"> Name <a> </th> The server side code would interpret the sort and direction parameters and sort results as instructed.
  - kasumis_ 10y ago
    Server side sorting is already being done :)
    - quasiuna 10y ago
      On the issue of sorting, it should be labelled ASC for Ascending, not AESC. That's the only fault I can find...
      - kasumis_ 10y ago
        will be fixed

CaptSpify 10y ago

Don't you realize that you can't build a usable site without mountains of JS and user-tracking scripts? /sarcasm It's really refreshing to see a fast, small efficient site that gets rid of all the bullshit. Congrats!

disiplus 10y ago
with all free services it starts this way ( look at imgur and so on. ) and eventually ends in ads ridden monster. but we usually end up in a couple of years great service, before they figure out that they could be earning money with serving ads or selling data.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  Let's be grateful for what we have now. The cycle is usually completed by another free service starting and being usable for the next few years, and in this case there's no pain in switching (no content you uploaded and spread URLs to), so I wouldn't worry. On the other hand, in the age of HTML "hello world" including an Angular installation, downloading Bootstrap from external CDN, and at least three different kind of tracking scripts, I think sites like this one need to be praised loudly.
- Fnoord 10y ago
  I never see any banners on Imgur. I block banners. What Extratorrents and The Pirate Bay do tho seems to be something akin to clickjacking. I click on a link to a torrent search result (or a download link), a tab opens, and it immediately closes. Rest assured this generates them money.
  - ErikDub 10y ago
    That is your adblocker closing the popup as soon as it opens. For users without an adblocker the tab stays open.
TeMPOraL 10y ago
Yes! At first I literally couldn't believe what I was seeing - ZERO third-party bullshit in uMatrix. Not just none to unblock to make the site work - none at all! (Apparently you can make a website without downloading Bootstrap from someone's external CDN...) And then... oh my God, how fast the site is. I can actually feel I have a somewhat modern, powerful computer. Usual day-to-day browsing makes me forget that. So yeah, for this reason alone I'll be using and recommending this site. Great job!

pratikborsadiya 10y ago

https://github.com/you-dont-need/You-Dont-Need-Javascript https://github.com/you-dont-need/You-Dont-Need-Javascript Here is a good collection of web-components which can be implemented without using JavaScript. Hope it helps you guys in developing the site. All the best.

omtinez 10y ago
Thanks for sharing that! Some of them are just a big pile of CSS which I don't know if it's a better option than JavaScript... But others were pure gold and a very clever use of HTML (like the carousel)

carbonmachine 10y ago

The top 1000 has a lot of software. The thought of running pirated software always filled me with unease, having been burned by malware in my younger days. Only tangentially related to this really well done torrent search (so snappy!), but does anyone have a feel for how safe this software is in general? Do security firms do any analysis on it?

kasumis_ 10y ago
We have an AI based differentiater which detects fake or malware infested torrents. However, since this is alpha state and is used sometimes. Once we are satisfied, it will be deployed. We still have deployed different mechanism to detect and fake torrents. There is also Voting and commenting for the community
BinaryIdiot 10y ago
Growing up I heard horror stories of people pirating versions of Windows, Office, etc that had backdoors installed. If you download pirated software there isn't a real way to know for 100% certainty that it isn't laced with something. So I avoid it like the plague. Even if the majority don't have anything it only takes the one and then, depending on its level of sophistication, you're screwed.
- IceyEC 10y ago
  With some things you can get a hash of an iso from the true source and compares that to the downloaded iso
- y4mi 10y ago
  i think we can be quite certain that there are backdoors into windows also without it being pirated, so your phrasing makes it easy to argue back. i'd personally argue with the backdoors hidden by the pirates are significantly more likely to be used for nefarious things than the 'official' ones, as whitehats are responsible for the former, while blackhats created the latter.
- slg 10y ago
  My favorite was all the pirated copies of Windows 10 that were floating around that supposedly had the telemetry features removed. It always confused me who exactly those were targeting.

yakult 10y ago

Suggestion: get rid of the torrent files and just serve magnet urls in plain text without a clickable button. This way you get rid of the knowledge of who-downloaded-what, and also save some bandwidth.

kasumis_ 10y ago
If 2 more users recommend this, it will be done.
- pizza 10y ago
  do this
  - kasumis_ 10y ago
    It will be done soon, thanks for voting.
- arthurcolle 10y ago
  What's the intent/desire for you to be on the delivering end of serving .torrent files?
  - kasumis_ 10y ago
    There is no intent, it's just there as many people still prefer torrent file. Though we have magnet links, so security focused users can download without us knowing nothing.
  - Fnoord 10y ago
    Tangible/easy mirroring of the torrent database? Then again, DHT wouldn't go down.
- leetbulb 10y ago
  i recommend this
- repomies691 10y ago

sfilargi 10y ago

Ridiculously fast! Would love to hear about your stack. C, what else? What database, template library?

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

pastaking 10y ago

Great site! What inspired you to create this and how will you afford to keep it running?

kasumis_ 10y ago
Too many ads and sloppy search. It will be kept running from our own pockets. If we run out of money,we may make it open-source or request donations.

royka118 10y ago

I like it!!

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

rnhmjoj 10y ago

Is there something like this I can run on my computer (or self-host)?

ecesena 10y ago

Suggestion: when searching for TV series, I'd try to sort results by decreasing season/episode (SnnExx), or at least simply by time.

sairamkunala 10y ago

wow Super fast. Interested to know the tech stack. I saw Caddy as the frontend server with https. and you use "C" below.

jordsta 10y ago

Uh, could purely be a coincidence but the favicon looks identical to the logo of UK TV corporation Sky (albeit with less colour): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sky_plc_logo.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sky_plc_logo.png

slg 10y ago
Are you really complaining that a site that is dedicated to copyright infringement might be misusing a trademark? I have a feeling that is the least of their legal concerns.
- DanBC 10y ago
  Trademark law is pretty fierce, and sites like these should generally want to minimise the legal attack surface.
  - 6stringmerc 10y ago
    Never underestimate the allure of digital heroism. I get a similar vibe as Aurous with this one. For profit or not it'll bear the brunt of an angry industry.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
simooooo 10y ago
Sky TV will be on it in no time
simonjgreen 10y ago
And now it's changed to something that looks rapidly scratched down in paint :D

amazon_not 10y ago

Search works incorrectly. +WORD1 +WORD2 returns WORD1 OR WORD2 instead of empty set if there is no match.

ghoshbishakh 10y ago

Firefox says 'your connection is insecure' and I need to add a security exception. Don't know why.

kasumis_ 10y ago
Our certificates are valid. Please verify at your end.
jpwagner 10y ago
this is very likely related to letsencrypt certs used with certain firefox versions

joe563323 10y ago

What is the business model ?

kome 10y ago
There is no business model hopefully. And it's really great!

sunny1304 10y ago

liked it.

DeepYogurt 10y ago

I applaud the effort, but what's the model for making money? Are you just self funding this?

awalGarg 10y ago

Asking purely out of curiosity: Are you actually based in India? (The domain is on the Indian TLD and the address in whois records lists an Indian city). Here in India, cyber law enforcement is a joke, and if some legal issue comes up with this site, I'd be curious to see how it works out. And, just a hypothetical follow up question: how would it work out if the site was not even DMCA compliant?

satbyy 10y ago
I'm not associated with it, but yeah, it was posted in /r/india few days ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/5mj3vz/setting_up_new_torrent_search_engine_ad_free_more/ https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/5mj3vz/setting_up_ne... Domain is from Gandi (France) and IP address (hosting?) seems to be from Netherlands

rz2k 10y ago

I think this a great idea. I looked up things like Tor Browser, Tails, and a few Linux distributions and popular open source projects. I found all of them far more quickly than I could have by going to their respective sites. Then I thought I probably shouldn't do that without promising myself to always verify the hashes, even if this site lets me start the download faster.

platinumm 10y ago

Thanks , for such search engine,that really includes no javascript and no cookies in any form. Secondly Its amazingly fast, I believe its more than just C language. I tried different combinations of searches on your search engine to check whether results are being served from cache or so. And it looks all searches(don't know your cache/uncache db design) are several times faster comparable to many. + +1 for speed. Also i feel i found a minor bug. Even though it looks passion project but don't know how long will you survive fighting DMCA ,others, costs without monetizing plans or accepting donations. Won't mind donation if you accept. Till you survive, i am glad for your engine.

kasumis_ 10y ago
Please file the bug on the email address mentioned on the website.

naklers 10y ago

Question: How to use metadata info in the search? e.g. "2016" or "1080p" Or only the titles are indexed?

Fnoord 10y ago

Perhaps show the NFO, or parse link to IMDB from NFO and link to that? You can also scrape NFOs to make genres and type of media (games, applications, audio, video, and subgenres of these).

jimparkins 10y ago

Hi, Love the site especially the speed. But disappointed that the search indexes the name of the container of the torrent only and not the name of the files within the torrent. To date the only site I know that does this is "filelisting dot com" but their website is very slow. Do you have any plans to extend your product to add this feature. Maybe as a premium option? Super useful to find single documents contained within archived bundles of files.

kasumis_ 10y ago
If 3 more users vote this feature, It will be provided for free to everyone and it will provided at the same speeds as the current website.
- hncommenter_ 10y ago
  Add my vote too. Thanks for your great work!
- gbtxg 10y ago
  Kindly add my vote too, for this feature.
- m3Lith 10y ago
  You get my +1.
- pps 10y ago
  Yes, please.
- a1371 10y ago
  Have my vote please as well.
- leonix 10y ago
  Indexing individual files is surely a great feature. Voting for it, too.
- bbotond 10y ago

atmosx 10y ago

This one is hosted using caddy[1]. I wonder what's the backed stack is. The server is hosted on NFOrce, in Netherlands[2]. Interesting. I wonder if we could get some sort of canary. The PGP-only mail policy is very interesting, I wonder if it will actually work even for DMC-related emails. [1] https://caddyserver.com/ https://caddyserver.com/ [2] https://www.nforce.com/about https://www.nforce.com/about

adgasf 10y ago

Amazing work; the site is extremely responsive!

throwaway987321 10y ago

Where can I safely download torrents from? A server in Switzerland seems the best option I've found, but wondering about Russia too. Payment would need to be in bitcoin to avoid handing over payment details.

ssreeniv 10y ago

Nice work! How recent are the search results and how frequently do they get updated?

kasumis_ 10y ago
Search results are continuously updated, search results are as recent upto last second.

hkjgkjy 10y ago

It'd be nice if I could self-host it, or have it run behind a TOR hidden service.

corv 10y ago

A useful addition would be to categorize the top 1000 based on file name extension.

jon-wood 10y ago

What's the chance of this getting a simple API which can be fed into flexget or similar?

kasumis_ 10y ago
are you talking about RSS, it's already there as soon as make a query to feed into flexget.
- jon-wood 10y ago
  I totally hadn't made that connection, thanks!

abrookewood 10y ago

Looks great and runs quickly. Couple of UI niggles: - The verified & marked icon is way larger than the others and completely throws out the spacing - I find it pretty difficult to tell what page of the results I am on and what pages I have visited - Because of the point above, a Forward/Back button for pages would be handy

vog 10y ago

That's very fast. How much hardware did you have to throw at this? Also, who pays the servers (since you aren't accepting donations)?

Walkman 10y ago

Privacy doesn't matter in case of torrents because as soon as you download one, peers will know who are you.

buro9 10y ago

Suggestions: 1. Enable whois privacy via Gandi 2. Hide your server IPs behind Cloudflare 3. Ensure the site is written such that it is trivial for yourself and others to use alternate domain names

kasumis_ 10y ago
no CDNs as it leads to tracking by CDNs.
- erelde 10y ago
  Close your port 22 at least. Define some simple iptables rules. Only able to login if coming from specific ip address, like a private vpn server.
StavrosK 10y ago
Will Cloudflare work for this kind of stuff? I assume you guys comply with DMCA takedowns and things?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
mulrian 10y ago
Yeah the whois thing should be done ASAP before you start to take on more users.
imglorp 10y ago
Is old whois data cached? If you launch without whois privacy and turn it on later, can someone go back in history and still find the registrant? As a side note, maybe someone like archive.org should keep time series whois data...
- sk7 10y ago
  > can someone go back in history and still find the registrant? Yes, there are some services which offer this, e.g.: http://www.domainhistory.net/skytorrents.in http://www.domainhistory.net/skytorrents.in

dandare 10y ago

add-free, non-tracking, not accepting donations - call me paranoid but unless I know why are you doing this I have to assume the worst. There simply is no free lunch.

achairapart 10y ago

Looks great. Now, does anyone also know any torrent client that work in the cloud?

aubreykilian 10y ago
https://put.io/ https://put.io/ ?

vs4vijay 10y ago

Kudos to you, add some categories if possible

misotaur 10y ago

Impressive,I would love to read a blog about the technologies you use.

Michael_m 10y ago
Count me also, i too would love to read a blog about your stack and technologies. Cassidy,C,rust,go,postgres,mysql, sphinx,lucene etc. I hope you may have tested many and would like to share your experiences.I can say its not just some off the shelf software you have deployed and bang! you have coded it. And i feel that if you are smart coder you can do wonders. Congratss for your digital heroism ?

_pdp_ 10y ago

SUGGESTION: instead of using a backend to swift through the torrents, why not host an offline JSON, sqlite or whatever (maybe streaming) client-side data format of your choice that contains the entire index. This way the application is not only offline but can be easily hosted and replicated. It will be offline and versioned. If the index is too large, than some splitting will be required but I think this is totally doable.

danielsamuels 10y ago

Not sure if it's a bug, but a common search for '1080p' returns no results (and takes around 10 seconds): https://www.skytorrents.in/search/all/ed/1/?q=1080p https://www.skytorrents.in/search/all/ed/1/?q=1080p

johnnydoe9 10y ago
Same with searching '720p'

the8472 10y ago

On a large screen the file list is too small in my opinion. The "Found related results" section takes up 80% of the screen space in comparison.

nemof 10y ago

hey, just a thought, but at some point if this gets too popular you will probably get a message from the UK TV company SKY who wont be super happy about your name.

aembleton 10y ago
Or the favicon that looks like it was lifted straight from on old version of their website.
- nemof 10y ago
  hah yes i hadn't spotted that but now you point it out i realise it was itching the back of my brain.

whocanfly 10y ago

This is blazing fast, congrats! However, I am concerned by the use of IN domain. Indian govtt frequently asks ISPs to block sites to avoid piracy. How do you plan to avoid getting blocked?

kasumis_ 10y ago
we only have https version
- rattray 10y ago
  Will that prevent the GOI (Government of India) from blocking the domain?
  - shadyabhi 10y ago
    Yes, here in India blocking happens on port 80 only. Kind of nice, comply with the requests from the government but don't really block anything for the good of masses.
- middleclick 10y ago
  Well even PirateBay had that... and they can just block DNS requests to the website. You should probably set up a hidden service on Tor.
  - kasumis_ 10y ago
    TOR service will be put in place soon

leni536 10y ago

I can't get over how fast this site is. Try the site in dillo or netsurf for a blazing fast torrent search experience.

IamHWengineer 10y ago

Love the speed. What's the stack for this?

prashnts 10y ago

You might want to move to some other tld. nic.in has some absurd rules. dnssec and whoisguard are not allowed with it, for example.

thomasdd 10y ago

Quote from FAQ: "Thanks, but currently we are NOT accepting donations." :) so cool.

raldu 10y ago

Notice how they make it difficult and painful to file DMCA complaints: https://www.skytorrents.in/dmca https://www.skytorrents.in/dmca Genius.

edraferi 10y ago
Doesn't seem too painful to me. They're basically just asking for an email with all the stuff that's legally required to be in a DMCA notice. Here's what the DMCA requires[1]: (i) A physical or electronic signature of a person authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed. (ii) Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed, or, if multiple copyrighted works at a single online site are covered by a single notification, a representative list of such works at that site. (iii) Identification of the material that is claimed to be infringing or to be the subject of infringing activity and that is to be removed or access to which is to be disabled, and information reasonably sufficient to permit the service provider to locate the material. (iv) Information reasonably sufficient to permit the service provider to contact the complaining party, such as an address, telephone number, and, if available, an electronic mail address at which the complaining party may be contacted. (v) A statement that the complaining party has a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law. (vi) A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed. [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512
rycho 10y ago
the fact that DMCA takedowns are applied to services that simply index other parts of the web is completely insane

superquest 10y ago

Add commas to "Serving 11234246 torrents"

aphextron 10y ago

I'm very wary of anything closed which bills itself as privacy focused and "non-tracking". Can you prove these claims openly? Otherwise this is just a public tracker, potentially full of malware and honeypots.

Eun 10y ago
Agreed here, the site is using a backend and who knows what this backend is tracking. It should be a static site and open source, so we can verify the claims.
- kasumis_ 10y ago
  We are planning to put up a tor onion frontend and thus tor users can browse even more anonymously.

jMyles 10y ago

Does anybody have a quick primer on adding security and privacy to the actual participation in the torrent swarm (ie, downloading and seeding)?

caio1982 10y ago

I don't mean to spoil all the fun (this service seems AWESOME, congrats and thank you), but who are you? It also kind of feels too good to be true...

CKFY 10y ago

Hi. I would concur that you guys should get some help with the UI elements. The Verified icon messing up row height aside, on my screen the no. of files column is excessively large, and the size column is too thin that often the unit MB/GB is squeezed down to the second line, which hurts readability.

julius 10y ago

#1 on HackerNews -> [Dynamic Search-Result] Page served in 39µs What kind of dark magic is this? What's your stack?

philtar 10y ago
Yeah it's stupidly fast.
SparkyMcUnicorn 10y ago
The only thing I see in the headers is that it's using https://caddyserver.com https://caddyserver.com
etatoby 10y ago
My guess is that he's using a compiled language such as Rust or Go, with a lightweight non-blocking framework, plus intelligent caching of backend queries, plus a decent backend such as Sphinx or PostgreSQL. Compare with interpreted languages for the frontend and Java monsters as backends (PHP and Lucene anyone?) People forget what modern computers are really capable of, when used properly.
Michael_m 10y ago
Yeah. Insanely fast,coders look insane :) /sarcasm

bogomipz 10y ago

This looks great. Nice work. On a privacy related note can anyone recommend a torrent friendly VPN provider? This + vpn would make a great combination. Cheer.

gurkendoktor 10y ago
AirVPN works great for me in Europe, usually around 1 MB/s downstream.

myf01d 10y ago

> Page served in 8.759µs kill me plz

franciscop 10y ago

I'm curious if this site is vulnerable to torrent XSS: http://security.stackexchange.com/q/86990/9161 http://security.stackexchange.com/q/86990/9161

spaceheeder 10y ago

Why is "You must identify in sufficient detail the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed." listed three times in your DMCA policy? Does the information actually need to be submitted in triplicate?

kasumis_ 10y ago
Fixed
- spaceheeder 10y ago
  Weird that I still see it (duplicate text hastily underlined with imgur's editing tools)[0]. [0]: http://i.imgur.com/n3VeeSh.png http://i.imgur.com/n3VeeSh.png
  - kasumis_ 10y ago
    Fixed for sure, was pending approval from other members
- TuringTest 10y ago
  I liked it repeated several times. It sorta made a point. (In fact I thought it was made on purpose).
logfromblammo 10y ago
Why not? A triplicated datum gives reasonable certainty that the complainant did not accidentally mis-identify the copyrighted work. The takedown requests are a waste of the complainant's time, anyway. The site does not host any files, and a listing of facts, such as the contents of a telephone book, is not eligible for copyright protections. Such a request is equivalent to a demand to remove someone's telephone number from the telephone book, because if you call it, the voice mail system plays Lionel Ritchie's recording of "Hello". It's ridiculous on its face. If there is nothing to take down, you can make the DMCA request process as burdensome as you like, because your response will always be a brush-off.

jasonjayr 10y ago

A few other folks have mentioned this, but a (monthly?) dump of the database, offered as a torrent link on the site would be fantastic. Not only would it enable offline searching, but when the inevitable take down shows up, folks can still continue to search the database.

kasumis_ 10y ago
7 more votes to get it done.
- pvg 10y ago
  It's really not an auction site. Set up a way to handle feature requests.
  - 6stringmerc 10y ago
    Don't worry, unless they set up a vote to "banish all US Copyright protected works" the inevitable RIAA/MPAA pressure will sort out the project by itself. I'm not delusional to claim Torrents are without legitimate purpose - they are - and I'm also not delusional enough to believe hosts/developers are powerless to address piracy of sorts.
- ardaozkal 10y ago
  +1
- etatoby 10y ago
  +1
- ulam2 10y ago
  +1
- dshacker 10y ago
  Vote this up!
- PeCaN 10y ago

bodecker 10y ago

This is fascinating! Any idea how it is implemented? Guessing it's using some open source search engine like Elasticsearch to build the indices/compute relevance in a centralized manner. Would it be possible to leverage the distributed nature of TOR to create a completely P2P/distributed version of this search engine? Relevance features like TF/IDF might be a bit challenging to implement, but it seems like it would be possible!

parito 10y ago

NordVPN is torrent friendly provider, I know many people do use them just in case

rastapasta42 10y ago

I actually was working on a similar project (http://pirategod.org/ http://pirategod.org/) few month ago, but sadly I got a fulltime job so had to abandon the project. Torrent protocol is a brilliant system for information sharing, and with fragmentation of services like Netflix we need to start considering other solutions again, until the industry can give us what we need.

bruno207 10y ago
That URL is amazing, I hope you're able to find a use for it in the future.
- tripzilch 10y ago
  You Wouldn't Download A Deity

UhUhUhUh 10y ago

Elegant! At first I thought there was an error between micro- and milli-seconds. But no... File search would be great indeed!

jiehong 10y ago

Hello, Great speed! But where is the list of torrents retrieved from in the end?

kasumis_ 10y ago
It's obtained from the DHT network itself
- shadyabhi 10y ago
  Are you using a opensource tool to crawl DHT?
  - kasumis_ 10y ago
    NO, closed source

severine 10y ago

If someone knows Python and uses qBittorrent, a search plugin for this site would be great! Instructions here: https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent/wiki/How-to-write-a-search-plugin https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent/wiki/How-to-write...

known 10y ago

Impressed by its speed https://builtwith.com/skytorrents.in https://builtwith.com/skytorrents.in

known 10y ago

Why Netcraft Risk Rating is so high? http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://www.skytorrents.in http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://www.skyto...

kasumis_ 10y ago
Because the domain is new. It's mentioned in the http://toolbar.netcraft.com/help/faq/index.html#riskrating http://toolbar.netcraft.com/help/faq/index.html#riskrating

_jomo 10y ago

Ordering by relevance seems to be a bit weird, try searching for "ubuntu server 16.04". Great service otherwise!

_jomo 10y ago

Does DMCA require you to delete URLs with hashes of files when you don't own the content? Also, are you allowed to publish the takedown requests?

alfg 10y ago

Refreshing to see such a fast website without any JS. Really interested in what your tech stack looks like.

newscracker 10y ago

I'd suggest using another TLD or having multiple TLDs to avoid losing it even temporarily (if at all someone decides to take this domain down). The .in TLD policies [1] require a real and accurate address of the registrant, which is not provided for this domain [2]: > Contact information: Registrants must provide true, accurate contact information. The following contact types are required: Registrant, Administrative, Technical, Billing. As per standing policy, the contact data will displayed in the .IN WHOIS, except for the Billing contact data, which is not displayed. [1]: https://registry.in/Policies https://registry.in/Policies [2]: https://registry.in/whois/skytorrents.in https://registry.in/whois/skytorrents.in / http://whois.domaintools.com/skytorrents.in http://whois.domaintools.com/skytorrents.in

mc42 10y ago

This is absolutely incredible, and the load times are incomprehensible for a modern site. What software powers the site? I did some looking and discovered it uses Bulma [1] instead of Bootstrap, and it's absolutely amazing. Another commenter pointed out that the site also uses Caddy for HTTP/2 and HTTPS. Excellent work, keep it up! [1] - http://bulma.io/ http://bulma.io/

leduce 10y ago

It would be fantastic if you had a onion services URL as well.

shadyabhi 10y ago

Any plans on providing search API?

arghwhat 10y ago

I appreciate how well this service is made. It's fast and looks nice without any useless dynamic crap to slow it down. You don't need JavaScript and 200 resources to make a nice page, and it is indeed amazing how fast a page gets when you remove the cruft. Kudos, good sir.

gaunwise 10y ago

This is awesome!!!

0natcer 10y ago

Wish I counld just click on the "Size", "Files", "Added", "SE" and "PE" to order them...

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

lolikoisuru 10y ago

It would be nice to get some sort for ratio of peers to seeders so I could find stuff that needs seeding.

DavideNL 10y ago

great... just needs a black/dark theme :-)