Andrew Sampton is a developer who thought that it would be cool to develop a torrent search engine that is not polluted by the results of crap or duplicated content. He has created GetStrike.com which allows very fast searches, clean, with quality results.
Strike indexes all public torrents, which is clearly a good start for a site of this type. However, Strike boosts its indexes by also scraping BitTorrent’s Distributed Hash Table. DHT search engines have appeared in the past but as far as we know, Strike is the first site to utilize both sets of resources.
In order to get information on torrents, Strike’s DHT “scraper” behaves like a regular torrent client, connecting to swarms and exchanging a few bytes with other peers. This enables it to gain access to all the peers in the swarm and the data they have.
The project also has an interesting approach to search and related results which grew out of QTBot, an AI tool originally written for Skype. Within Strike, QTBot caches common terms and phrases to see which results it should present first. It recognizes that high seeder counts are important but also considers other factors, including whether to present the latest version of a release if users search for them enough.
Clicking on search results brings up a details page which reveals all content inside each torrent, useful in the unlikely event a user is presented with a suspect file. Files can then be accessed via a torrent or magnet link, with RSS and Twitter announcing options for those that way inclined.
Strike certainly stands out as one of the cleanest torrent sites around. Those looking for the most comprehensive sets of results on the rarest of content might be a little disappointed, but most things even moderately mainstream are well catered for.
The site now has become totally dynamic and only fetches data requested by the user. Strike now operates purely on demand. When a user types in a search the site pulls the results from its usual sources and presents them in the browser window. When that browser is closed the data effectively disappears from its servers.
GetStrike - A Search Engine for Torrents at Lightning Speed
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