BitTorrent search engine coming

According to Wired, BitTorrent will launch a commercial search engine in two weeks. This will be huge. First off, Bram Cohen (founder of BitTorrent) is a smart guy and surely has a slick search engine ready to go. But the real interesting part will be if he’s got smart lawyers also ready to go when Hollywood and the RIAA get a look at the search engine. Both have shown a zeal for attacking the weak (that’s why Google doesn’t get sued for being able to search Torrents).

I was hoping that Bram would first launch some sort of anonymity controls built into BitTorrent, but I’m sure that will come at some point.

Until big media catches on to the fact that consumers want to download content on demand, protocols like BitTorrent will flourish with "illegal" activity. The only media torrents I download are TV shows, material that has recently flown freely into my home. It’s equivalent to TiVo, but without the service fees. The old paradigm that networks set when viewers watch programs is so out dated its not even funny. I would happily pay a small fee ($1-2 maybe) in exchange for a broadcast quality program. If they stuck in ads, there wouldn’t need to be a fee and the networks would get extremely valuable data about their viewers.

Tomorrow Verizon will finish installing a 15 megabit fiber optic internet connection into the house, that’s a big enough pipe to do some damage with BitTorrent.