Last week saw the end of the world’s biggest torrent meta-search engine torrentz.eu. The mega torrents search engine mysteriously announced “farewell” to its millions of users. Torrentz.eu hosted not torrents of its own but only linked to other sites hosting torrents such as The Pirate Bay. Torrentz.eu may be dead but a new clone site keeps it alive.
As reported by Gadgets 360, a new clone site which goes by the name torrentz2.eu provides the exact same functionality as the original torrentz.eu website. The home page even looks remarkably similar. The UI also looks to be the same, with the traditional search field on the left side and the search button the right.
The home page says – “Torrentz2.eu is a clone of Torrentz, a free, fast and powerful meta-search engine combining results from dozens of search engines.” Looks like torrentz2.eu is a better version of the now defunct torrentz.eu site. The clone site performs just like torrentz.eu and also aims to do what all clones sites are meant to do – keep the main site alive!
Torrentz.eu mysteriously stopped working just a few days after the shutdown of KickAss Torrents. The owner of KickAss Torrents, Artem Vaulin was arrested in Poland for copyright infringement, money laundering and other charges and is wanted by the US Department of Justice. Soon after KickAss Torrents stopped working, many clone sites sprang to life and promised better experience and data content than the main site. It looks like the same has happened with Torrentz.eu. The new clone site seems to be an upgraded version of the original site.
Even since it was founded in 2003, Torrentz.eu has been the most favorite search engine for the torrent community for over 13 years straight. The reason for shutting down torrentz.eu remains unknown. Torrentz.eu was ranked 186 on web ranking service Alexa. That’s clearly ahead of websites like Weather.com and Flickr. Torrent community just loved torrentz.eu. It was the “Google” of the torrenting universe. It’s worth noting that torrentz.eu domain continues to exist. If you visit the site and try to search, you will only be greeted with a sweet message – “Torrentz will always love you. Farewell.” Whether the arrest of Artem Vaulin and the subsequent shutdown of KickAss Torrents led to the sudden death of torrentz.eu is not established. In fact, this doesn’t seem to be the result of a direct legal action. Because, torrentz.eu never hosted the pirated files themselves, it only displayed the links. And it has promptly complied with DMCA takedown requests by removing links to pirated content.
In spite of the efforts of the governments the world over to combat piracy, Torrenting as a file-sharing technique may not see an immediate death. In fact, if history is anything to go by, time and again several torrent sites have been taken down and still torrents continue to live on. And torrentz2.eu is just another example!