Mininova Surpasses A Billion Downloads

By Amit Chowdhry ● Jan 9, 2007

Mininova is one of the largest BitTorrent search engines for all types of files available on the Internet from movies, to MP3s, to books on PDF. As many people know, BitTorrent technology was written by Bram Cohen and is becoming very popular. µTorrent is the mainstream software that is used to download torrents and was acquired about a month ago.

TorrentFreak.com, a blog that focuses mostly on Bittorrent updates had a chance to exclusively interview Niek, a founder of Mininova. When Niek was asked about when he first learned about BitTorrent, he stated that it was sometime in 2003 and Rob, another mininova staff members pointed out the new protocol. Niek then started building Mininova in December 2004 and the first public version was released on January 15, 2005.

Recently, a new version of Mininova was released and new features are being prototyped. Mininova runs on 13 servers, one being in the U.S. for forums and the Mininova staff has about 5 members. Mininova averages 2 or 3 removal requests from organizations promoting the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, but Mininova is able to avoid removing content by pointing out Mininova’s copyright policy.

While downloading MP3s are mainly used through LimeWire, iTunes, MySpace, etc., torrents make downloading full MP3 albums easier similar to a .zip file, so many people have been turning to this service. Personally, I have not tried out the service myself, but I believe that this relatively new P2P protocol is here to stay and the MPAA or RIAA won’t be able to do much to stop its growth.

[Source: TorrentFreak]