Torrent Typhoon, a Torrent Search Engine

Note: As of September 2011, Torrent Typhoon is no longer in service. However, there are other very useful torrent search resources that can be found online: see the Top 15 Torrent Search Engines.

What is Torrent Typhoon?

Torrent Typhoon is a BitTorrent metasearch engine. Torrent Typhoon searches major BitTorrent sites and at the time of this writing offers over 400,000 torrents available for search.

How to Use Torrent Typhoon

Thankfully, Torrent Typhoon is very simple to use - not all BitTorrent search engines can make that claim. Navigate to the main Torrent Typhoon home page and you'll see the main search bar in the middle of the page. To the direct left of the search bar is a dropdown menu; you can choose to search any BitTorrents (default), or you can choose to search music, movies, or games.

Directly underneath the Seek button, you'll see Preferences. Right now there really is not a lot of preferences to choose from; you only get to decide whether or not you'd like to include dead torrents (links that don't work) in your search results, and the site timeout parameters. I would expect this will include more options as the site continues to grow.

The first time you search Torrent Typhoon, you'll be taken to a verification page - this only happens once, and it's to verify that you are indeed a human being and not a bot or a crawler.

Okay, on to results. You're going to see multiple ads for UseNext, inviting you to try your search there. From what I've seen in my research about UseNext, I would NOT recommend their services - buyer beware big time. However, that brings me to the question of why is Torrent Typhoon suggesting UseNext's services if their reputation is so shoddy, and is Torrent Typhoon to be trusted? Well, I would say yes - a very guarded yes. Torrent Typhoon does not host these torrents, it merely helps you find them, and then you can download them from other sites. My standard BitTorrent legal disclaimer still applies:

You need to know that while searching for Bit Torrents and P2P sharing technology is legal, that many of the files that you will come across are actually copyrighted. Copyright law in the United States and other countries (excluding Canada) makes these Bit Torrent files and downloading these Bit Torrent files at risk for legal action, including lawsuits.

Why Should I Use Torrent Typhoon?

First of all, it's a clean, well-coded site. I've looked a lot of BitTorrent search sites that really seem to make it their mission to make BitTorrents and finding them as difficult as humanly possible. Torrent Typhoon is a great one-stop shopping kind of deal for BitTorrents; I appreciated that the search process brought back fast, relevant BitTorrent results.