New Torrent Search Engine Abuses Wikipedia to Get Traffic

[Chewy_fox]

Getting a torrent site off the ground is no easy feat in the current environment but doing so by misleading the public isn't a great start. A new torrent search site appears to be doing just that, by editing the Wikipedia pages of famous torrent sites in order to drive traffic to its domain.

In the world of file-sharing, few will argue that the environment in 2017 is very, very different from that of 2007. Running sites is far from straightforward, with all kinds of roadblocks likely to appear along the way.

One of the early problems is getting new sites off the ground. Ten years ago it was easy to find mainstream technology sites touting the latest additions to the pirate landscape. These days, however, reporting is mainly restricted to innovative platforms or others with some particularly newsworthy aspect.

With those loose advertising opportunities now largely off-limits, new sites and those on the fringes are often taking more unusual approaches. Today another raised its head revealing a particularly poorly judged promotional effort.

Back in April, a new torrent site hit the scene. Called RapidTorrent, it’s a meta-search engine that by definition indexes other torrent sites. Like many others, it’s doing whatever it can to get noticed, but it’s probably the first to try and do that by using Wikipedia.

Early today, the Wikipedia pages of a whole range of defunct and live torrent sites were edited to include links to RapidTorrent. One of the first was the page for defunct meta-search engine BTDigg.

“In May 2017 BTDig (sic) staff launched rapidtorrent, a fast torrent search engine,” the page now reads, along with a link to the new torrent site.

Similar edits could also be found for Demonoid’s page, which was also defaced to note that “In May 2017 Demonoid launched rapidtorrent, a fast torrent search engine.”

In fact, links to the new torrent site were inserted in a range of other pages including The Pirate Bay, Mininova, isoHunt and ExtraTorrent.

While many people might like the opportunity to discover a new torrent site, there can be few who appreciate the defacing of Wikipedia to achieve that goal. Millions of people rely on the platform for information so when that is compromised by spam and what amount to lies, people are seriously misled.

Indeed, striking while the iron’s hot, the Wikipedia spam this morning also extended to the French language Wikipedia page of NYAA, a site that unexpectedly shut down only this week.

As shown in the image below, the site’s real domain has been completely removed only to be replaced with RapidTorrent’s URL.

While the other edits are bad enough, this one seems particularly cruel as people looking for information on the disappeared site (which is in the top 500 sites in the world) will now be led directly to a non-affiliated domain.

Those that do follow the link are greeted with another message on the site itself which claims that the search engine is being run by the original NYAA team, while at the same time soliciting bitcoin donations.

For new torrent sites looking for an early boost in traffic, times are indeed hard, so it’s no surprise that some turn to unorthodox methods. However, undermining free and valuable resources like Wikipedia is certainly not the way to do it, will not produce the required results, and is only likely to annoy when the deception is unveiled.

Edited May 21, 2021 by Chewy_fox

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