Video:What Is Isohunt?

Transcript:What Is Isohunt?

Hi, I'm Zoya Popova for About.com, and today we're going to talk about Isohunt.

Isohunt Shares Torrents

Isohunt.com is a website is a place you might want to visit if you're looking to download movies, songs, software, e-books. Isohunt doesn't actually host any of those media and software files, which are, by nature, quite large. Instead, it stores million upon million of .torrent files.

And .torrent files are really small files which refer you to other internet users that have the large target files on their computers. Therefore, Isohunt is a facilitator of peer-to-peer BitTorrent sharing.

Search in Isohunt

Isohunt boasts an impressive collection of several million torrent files, and new ones are added each day. You can search that collection using Isohunt's built-in search engine, much like you would use regular websearch. For example, you can put your search terms in quotation marks, allowing you to search for a particular phrase.

Also, you can use boolean operators, such as AND, NOT, and OR.For the sake of example, if we searched for “the attack of the giant squid OR leeches”, Isohunt would retrieve files mentioning either "the attack of the giant squid" or "the attack of the giant leeches." It is important to remember though that, even if you do not use any boolean operators, Isohunt still implies them. Namely, it implies an AND operator in front of all of your keywords unless otherwise specified.

Why is this important? Because Isohunt will literally give you no results unless they feature each and every keyword that you entered. Here's an example. Let's say you're looking for a torrent for the classic horror movie "The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari." When you enter this title in the search box, you get zero results, which is surprising because this is an extremely famous movie, and in the public domain.

The reason for that is that none of the torrent files on Isohunt have the actual word “doctor” in them. They are all abbreviated as "Dr." So instead of searching by the other two keywords, Isohunt simply returns zero results. The same holds true if you misspell a word or make a typo. Generally, any inaccuracy in the Isohunt search will retrieve zero results.

The moral of the story: When searching Isohunt, use as few keywords as possible, and make sure they are relevant and accurate. And if you're not sure if your search term is accurate, tag it as optional by using the OR operator in front of it.

Choose Isohunt Files Wisely

After your search, you will end up with a list of possible torrent files to choose from. Normally, you want to download the files that have the biggest number of seeders and leechers, because this will result in a faster download. On a final note, keep in mind that some torrents may be used to share content that has not been properly licensed. As a user, you should be aware of the risks associated with copyright infringement.

And this is it for Isohunt. Thank you for watching, and for more information, please visit us at About.com.