Gary Fung founded BitTorrent search engine isoHunt.com in 2003 when he was a 19-year-old student at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. With the demise of The Pirate Bay , isoHunt is now the second most popular peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing site today behind Mininova , and ranked in the top 250 Web sites in the world by both Alexa and Quantcast.
Fung talked with Computerworld about how isoHunt has evaded legal trouble so far, why he holds out hope of working together with Hollywood and the music industry, and how he's launched a new P2P site for just that purpose.
How did you start isoHunt? I was studying engineering and physics at UBC when I started isoHunt. I just wanted to learn some new programming.
Were you an active file-sharer? Not really. Frankly, I wasn't even using Napster back then. But I saw how potentially disruptive P2P was to the entertainment industry and content distribution in general. There was a gap in terms of a good search engine for file-sharing networks. Google was getting big back then, but wasn't yet on top. Neither Pirate Bay nor MiniNova were around yet.
How is isoHunt different from them? The Pirate Bay gathered the torrents that point to files and hosted them on its own servers on something called a BitTorrent tracker. A tracker is like a traffic cop for content: it tells a downloader who else has the content you're looking for.
Pirate Bay also categorized torrents for easier browsing. Both BitTorrent trackers and categorization are touchy issues, legally. Because the law is all about intent, whether you are intentionally leading people to copyright infringement.
isoHunt is a search engine, which most of the others are not. We go out and index the torrents on other BitTorrent trackers, including MiniNova, LegalTorrent.com and others: sites with Creative Commons-licensed music, as well as BitTorrent sites with just Linux and open-source software.
As a search engine, we don't host torrents, nor do we edit or categorize them. We just link back to the sites hosting the torrents, as well as cache a copy of those torrents.
Google does the same thing. If you go to Google and type in a TV show's name and add "filetype:torrent" you will see torrents, too.
I don't think isoHunt would be better as a directory. You saw the competition between directories versus search engines: Yahoo versus Google. We all know how that went.
How big is IsoHunt today? We get 30 million unique visitors a month. And I think we are the largest site in terms of quality and quantity of torrent files in our index.
We use the open-source Lucene software for search. We've done a lot of custom tricks to improve it.
Our index takes up 30 GB on MySQL databases. We program in PHP. PHP has its problems, but it has a lot of history, a lot of libraries, and is very fast. The fact that we have only 14 servers in Toronto is testimony to how fast PHP is.
Counting me, there are 5 employees. There are two systems administrators and two developers and me. I develop and do a whole bunch of other stuff.
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