A Comparison of BitTorrent Search Engines and Critique

An interesting blog posting today complains about another well-referenced blog post that claimed Btjunkie is the largest BitTorrent search engine. What's BitTorrent? BitTorrent is a peer to peer file sharing technology often used to transfer large files, sometimes of copyrighted material. Since I am not a frequent BitTorrent user (having only checked it out quickly a few times), I will not give any personal preference to these search engines.What struck me the most about the post is that it has an excellent critique of search engine size studies. Basically, it is easy to get a larger number of hits by leaving many dead links in the database. That reminds me of a tale I heard once from an AlltheWeb engineer who talked about finding millions of pages of German spam in their database and then removing them. The next day he heard complaints from some German users because the number of results on the searches they were testing suddenly decreased. The German users assumed that AlltheWeb was crawling less of the German Web, even though from the engineer's perspective, they were just cleaning up the database.