This queries the tracker websites, but I was hoping this would be a distributed hash table (DHT) search engine, like bitcq. Bitcq is indispensible for obscure torrents, but its interface could be better.
Edit: wait, looking at the source, this doesn't search torrents on the mentioned trackers, it keeps an eye on feeds of newest or most popular (in case of tpb) torrents and caches the tracker metadata. This doesn't seem very useful to me. Over a long time you'll have a big view of the tracker's database, but not older content than you started tracking, and, in the case of tpb, you'll just have a view of torrents that have been in the top 100 since you started crawling. Weird. Also, peer counts don't seem to get updated, I think.
I wanted a very small, efficient program that anyone could run without ceremony on their machine. Nim made it very easy for me to do. It looks like Python/Ruby, runs really fast, and uses very little resources. I love Nim!
After a brief look at the code it doesn't seem so, however there's a procedure (insert_torrent() in src/torrents.nim) in which a retrieved torrent is added to the database, of which one column is the name of the torrent, so it would be possible to insert a filter based on a list of nsfw words that would discard the torrent if one or more are found.
Of course it wouldn't work on torrents that hide their nature, which hopefully happens very rarely.
Interesting project, what are some similar self-hosted solutions that allow you to search torrents on public trackers?
To the author: How do you personally use it, do you have a custom interface to search the aggregated results or do you just plug it into a bigger content consumption system?
Magnetico[1] is an easy-to-use, self-hosted DHT crawler. It has a web UI that shows statistics and gives you a search engine (it uses sqlite full-text search).
It needs quite a bit of bandwidth and some storage space, but worked well so far, for me. I've been running it for a couple of years and it indexed around 12.5M torrents (36GB of uncompressed database).
You can somewhat control the bandwith by limiting the number of simultaneous peers: in my case the usage seems to be around 5 Mbps up/down.
If you're running it from home, the real problem is not the bandwidth but the number of open connections the router has to keep track (assuming the network is NATed). The default settings will likely crash any cheap consumer router, so I would run the daemon from a VPS or a machine that isn't behind a NAT.
I use it to search for DODI releases and x265 releases, it's faster than looking through websites. Once I finish Radarr/Sonnar support, I'll point my instances at Torrentinim.
If you want a hosted tracker instead, I’ve used privtracker.com for personal files with success.
If you want to set one up, chihaya or udpt might do the job.
What do people use this for? I mean beside creating another pirate bay (CIMMW, that's the only thing comes to mind when I see "torrent search engine").
Edit: wait, looking at the source, this doesn't search torrents on the mentioned trackers, it keeps an eye on feeds of newest or most popular (in case of tpb) torrents and caches the tracker metadata. This doesn't seem very useful to me. Over a long time you'll have a big view of the tracker's database, but not older content than you started tracking, and, in the case of tpb, you'll just have a view of torrents that have been in the top 100 since you started crawling. Weird. Also, peer counts don't seem to get updated, I think.