BitTorrent Zeitgeist: The Top Torrent Searches of 2011

By now, you’ve doubtless seen the Google Zeitgeist, the historical record of searching over the past year. Interesting, right? You know what’s even more interesting? It’s evil twin, the BitTorrent Zeitgeist, record of searches — for piracy! Ooo, spooky! Unlike Google, which is the undisputed king of searching, there’s no real central hub for BitTorrent searches, but Kat.ph, one of the top 5 most visited torrent sites, has published its most popular search terms and they are more unlike Google searches than you might expect.

Without further ado, here’s the list:

1. ita
2. french
3. 2011
4. ita dvd
5. xxx
6. dvdrip
7. italian
8. kickasstor
9. thor
10. 720p
11. psp
12. harry potter
13. glee
14. kung fu panda 2
15. green lantern
16. 1080p
17. wwe
18. movies
19. porn
20. transformers 3
21. cars 2
22. captain america
23. windows 7
34. true blood
25. fast and furious 5
26. hindi
27. sex
28. game of thrones
29. telugu
30. tamil
31. rango
32. super 8
33. playboy
34. x art
35. how i met your mother
36. pirates of the caribbean
37. x men
38. transformers
39. mac
40. rio
41. supernatural
42. kickassto
43. source code
44. adele
45. house
46. sucker punch
47. final destination 5
48. dexter
49. nero
50. breaking bad

Now, you might have a little trouble parsing those first few; I know I did at first. “Ita” and “french” are just search terms that are being used to try and discover content that is either Italian of French. Neither of them are targeted at any specific piece of content and, in fact, you’ll see a lot of that towards the top of the list. Aside from the wealth of terms that seem to be searching for a category rather than a specific thing, the other interesting thing to notice is the abundance of recording artists on the list. There’s Adele and then, well, that’s it. Just Adele. I don’t know about you, but I generally associate piracy first with the music industry, then with software and games, then movies, then TV, so it’s interesting to see TV and movies taking up so much of the list, leaving games and music relatively underrepresented.

And there you have it folks, furtive glance into what the world is torrenting. Is it what you expected?

(via TorrentFreak)

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