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H. M. N. Dilum Bandara and Anura P. Jayasumana
Last Updated - May 16, 2012
We highly appreciate the contribution of all the
survey participants.
Objective
To understand (quantitatively) whether users access multiple
BitTorrent search engines and how frequently.
Conclusion
Though BitTorrent users are aware and use multiple BitTorrent
communities (i.e., P2P search engines), 89% of the time they
prefer to use 1 or 2 search engines (i.e., users are loyal to
few communities). Therefore, by catering to few most preferred
communities of a given user P2P performance and quality
enhancement solutions can gain better results.
Summary of Findings
Survey link was posted on user communities of
kat.ph,
forum.suprbay.org, and
fenopy.eu, and was also e-mail to friends between Mar
11 to Apr 14, 2012. We received 238 positive responses (332
attempted the survey) from 42 countries as of May 9, 2012.
Types of contents accessed by users
As expected, users seem to be accessing
variety of contents. What features
provided by search engines are frequently used?
Majority of users relies on search and browse options. However,
their content access choice is also influenced by what is
popular (e.g., Top 50/100 and recent searches lists). Thus, there is a tendency for a popular content to become even more popular. Search cloud seems to be not used frequently
to decide what to access/download.
Search engines know and use
Only the most popular 40 sites are shown as our focus was on distribution of search engine usage than relative popularity among sites.
Though users are aware of many search engines, they use only a
small subset of those (average drop from 7.8 to 3.4).
| |
Min |
Max |
Average |
Std |
Mode |
| Types of content
accessed by a user |
1 |
12 |
4.6 |
2.3 |
4 |
| Search
engine features |
1 |
6 |
2.1 |
1.1 |
1 |
| No of
search engines known to a user |
1 |
36 |
7.8 |
6.4 |
1 |
| No of search engines
used |
1 |
19 |
3.4 |
2.8 |
1 |
How frequently are those search
engines accessed.
How many times a particular search engine will be visited, if a user to search 20
times. Only the most popular 40 sites are shown.
73% of the time users prefer to use a single search engine and
1-2 search engines are accessed 89% of the time. Though users
know and use several P2P communities, they frequently revisit (or are loyal
to) only a
few communities. Country of
participants
Selected comments
-
Used these sites in India frequently not in the US
-
Please make sure they don't ask us to register to be able to download!
-
There aren't many seeders around.
People fear using torrent clients, as 95% of downloads are
illegal.
-
When I have a torrent that is working, I search other instances of that torrent by hash
and add trackers. Additionally, I maintain a list of generic trackers.
- It is unjustifiable to stop torrents as people in 3rd world
countries heavily depend on torrents
- Help torrent search engine from going down due to government
rules. like btjunkie
- Nice idea to connect the world. It's actually a social
network. everyone will benefit from this
- I didn't aware about such a number of torrent search engines
- It would be great if possible to seach torrents using a
single site. In future using anonymizing technologies like
Freenet and GNUNet there will be much pirate stuff can be
found in Internet if special laws against such technologies
will come in to play.
- I rarely use BitTorrent search function as I use RSS to auto
download my torrents.
- Mostly I use google to search for torrent files
- They should be made more safe and free from malawares,
rootkits and backdoor trojans
- IF there is a global bittorrent downloader engine which
perform global serach on user defined bit-torrent sites &
retirves torrents on highest seeds priority level, that
would replace searching torrent sites & timing.
- Indexin is not a crime.
- Need more reliable torrent uploaders without fakers
- I don't just use the all of the above; there are a few more
that are not listed.
- Regarding question 6: I always start with The Pirate Bay,
but if TPB doesn't have what I am looking for I move on to
other torrent indexes.
- Most are crap. Some are great!
- Torrent contents are really useful. We don't need to shut
them down due to copy rights violations.
- prefer private sites (needs login & maintain seed/leech
ratio )
- I use BitTorrent primarily for TV Shows, and I use RSS feeds
for automatically download them.
- It's just a technology (Peer to peer is awesome). The legal
or illegal debate depend on the content we share. That's it
:)
- Survey does not list many private trackers (though doing
such would probably be impractical)
- in UAE they have blocked KickAss torentz.Before that I have
used it most of the time.Then I moved to bit torrent.After
using few months I search which is the most populalar
torrent client from wikipedea.
- At the moment my ISP has banned accessing The Pirate Bay. So
I have to use proxy to access it.
- Since North Cyprus is not recognized as a country, it's very
easy to pirate, as there are no official rules for online
media distribution.
- Bittorrent search engines are useless and inneficients
- They're awesome, they're a great way to share so many
things, and restrictive bills like SOPA, PIPA, and their
counterparts throughout the world, as well as all of the
billionaire bullies that support them need to be stopped!
- Many things that I download are (if they are good) purchased
at a later date.
- Bittorent is good to check if stuff has quality. If it's
good it's worth buying.
- bittorrent is great,it's the perception of a person that
matters the most
- I usually search for things on Demonoid, but then go to The
Pirate Bay to actually download them. If I find that a
torrent is going slow, I'll search it's hash on Torrenz and
add the trackers listed on that site to the tracker list in
the torrent.
Dataset
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