About XTORX
A torrent meta-search engine that has been pointing at other people's indexes since 2011.
What it does
You type a query once. XTORX encodes it once per index, 19times over, because every one of them expects its search terms in a slightly different shape: some want spaces as plus signs, some as hyphens, some inside the path rather than the query string. Then it hands you the finished links.
That is the whole product. There is no crawler, no database and no server doing work on your behalf. The site is a folder of static HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and the links are assembled in your own browser.
What it does not do
- It hosts no torrent files, no magnet links and no copies of anything.
- It runs no tracker and joins no swarm.
- It has no analytics, no advertising, no cookies and no third-party scripts.
- It never contacts the indexes itself. Your browser does, only when you click.
Privacy
Because there is no backend, there is nothing to log. Recent searches live in your browser's local storage and can be cleared from the home page or by clearing site data. Outbound links carry rel="noopener noreferrer", so the index you open is not told which page sent you or what you typed here.
Open content first
The 4 archives at the top of every result page carry material that is explicitly free to copy and redistribute: the Internet Archive, Academic Torrents, Linux Tracker and Project Gutenberg. BitTorrent was built for exactly this, and it is still the best way to move a Linux image or a large research dataset.
The 2011 version
XTORX started as a handful of PHP files: a form that POSTed to search.php, which printed a fixed list of links with the keyword pasted into each one. It worked for a decade. It also echoed the raw search term straight into the HTML, which was a cross-site scripting hole, and by the end the host had been compromised and the index page was carrying an injected dropper.
The rebuild keeps the idea and the green wordmark, and drops everything else: no PHP, no trackers, no advertising SDK, and a results page whose links are built through URL encoding that cannot produce markup. The old files are kept in the repository, disinfected, as a record.
Indexes that did not survive
Torrent indexes come and go. These were on XTORX at some point and are now gone: BTJunkie, isoHunt, Fenopy, Btmon, ScrapeTorrent, Seedpeer, SUMOTorrent, Torrentbit, TorrentReactor, MNova, Veoble, SkyTorrents, ETTV, ilCorsaroNero, RARBG, Torrentz2, TorrentFunk, BitSearch, Solid Torrents, GloTorrents.
See also the disclaimer and the takedown policy.