Search : Next Frontier For BitTorrent

(Via Wired) BitTorrent speeds internet file transfers by shifting the bandwidth burden off the publisher, and distributing it among users downloading the file: Everyone downloading a file over BitTorrent is unobtrusively uploading it to other users at the same time so that large, popular files actually move at a faster rate than obscure ones. BitTorrent is in the final stage of launching an advertising-supported search engine dedicated to cataloging and indexing the thousands of movies, music tracks, software programs and other files for download over the popular BitTorrent protocol. The free search tool will be the first large-scale commercial offering from BitTorrent, that so far has drawn most of its revenue from T-shirt sales and PayPal donations. Although BitTorrent has become associated with online piracy thanks to its role in distributing copyright movies and television shows, the company is eager to highlight its utility as a completely lawful program for furthering free speech.
The ranked search results will be accompanied by sponsored links provided through a partnership with Ask Jeeves, says Ashwin Navin, BitTorrent's chief operating officer. BitTorrent will make money from each clickthrough. "Ask Jeeves syndicates advertising products to many different sites, and BitTorrent will be one of them. The search engine is expected to go live within two weeks and it will live on BitTorrent,from where the open-source software is distributed. The new search engine takes that dynamic into account. It resembles Google in operation, with a simple interface and results ranked by an automated process. But unlike a general web search, the BitTorrent web crawler interacts with each torrent behind the scenes to determine the number of nodes downloading and uploading through it. That lets the search engine order its results by the throughput of each torrent.