As of October 27, 2006, the 5 Best Bit Torrent search engine sites are listed below. This list is selected from hundreds of reader votes, and voted on each week by a small panel of torrent download users.

The criteria used to evaluate these torrent sites: breadth and depth of database, database currency, ease of use and searching, speed of access, general integrity of files, information provided about the files, information provided on the torrent P2P community, price of membership, and readers’ comments.

Warning: while P2P file sharing technology is completely legal, many of the files traded through P2P are copyrighted. Unless you live in Canada where citizens are shielded from P2P copyright lawsuits, then downloading P2P files may put you at risk for a civil lawsuit in any other country. These lawsuits usually take the form of class-action suits, filed against groups of users who are logged as blatantly copying and distributing copyrighted materials. Recently, the MPAA and RIAA, along with the governments of England and Australia, took several thousand users to court, demanding that they pay thousands of dollars in copyright infringement penalties.

Your Internet Service Provider may, at their discretion, release their logs of your downloading activity to potential copyright plaintiffs. The more megabytes you download, the more you risk being sued by the MPAA, RIAA, and other pro-artist groups. Please keep this risk in mind before you use any of the following Torrent search engines below.