Speckly

Mea Culpa

Sorry foks. We were a little over confident this past weekend and left the Speckly website unattended these past couple days - everyone went Halloween trick-or-treating. Needless to say, the Speckly website went down leaving you without any service for an extended period of time.

In most instances, if there is an issue with the servers, they will automaticaly reboot. Unfortunately, you cannot predict every scenario, and in this instance, they went down requiring manual reboot. To remedy this for the future, someone on the team will always get an automatic notification of any issue. If there is any server problems, we hope to limit any down time.

OK. Now that we have that taken care of that unpleasantness, back to your Speckly searches!

The Speckly Team

Faster Torrent Searches!

In our last post, we did some maintenance work. This wasn't simple updates, but a major upgrade. Given a couple weeks time to ensure stability, we're glad to report to you that those upgrades have decreased the average search times by about 15%.

More importantly, this upgrade also allows us to build and deploy new features much faster. So in the next while, you will be seeing some new features outside of performance and infrastructure upgrades.

Happy BitTorrent searching!

The Speckly Team

Site Maintenance Tonight

Update: Maintenance seems to have gone smoothly. We will continue to monitor and please let us know if you experience any difficulties with the site.

We are performing some server upgrades tonight.  Please bear with us through any glitches.  Downtime is expected to be minimal.

Speckly adds FullDLS

We've just added FullDLS over the weekend. Enjoy!

1 Year Anniversary

We've hit the one year mark and we're still ticking! In that period, we've had over 4.2 million searches on Speckly. Whew - just our little contribution to the world of BitTorrents! Forgive us for being so bold, but we think you like what we've done.

In the past year, we've only done incremental visible changes while spending most of our time on behind-the-scenes upgrades. With the current usage and your feedback, it looks like we are doing the right thing. Moving forward, we plan to introduce more features per your suggestions as well as moving forward on our own feature list.

So, continue with your "Speckling" (and no, it wasn't some Speckly marketing guru that made it up, but a random person that made the comment), and keep an eye out as we will slowly introduce new features for your pleasure!

Thank you!
The Speckly Team

Speckly Adds SUMOTorrent

Wahoo! SUMOTorrent is now a part of our list of Torrent websites that we search. We've been a little late in the game with them (apologies to good folks at SUMOTorrent), but with their addition, you should have a good cross section of Torrent sites and get most of what you want from our search engine.

Anyway, more good things are coming your way in the next several months. Cheers!

Switching up Quick Peek

If you haven't noticed by now, our Quick Peek feature is now the main link on each listing and going to the torrent tracker site is now this button:

All feedback welcome. Click here to add your comments!

Search engine tuning

Hope everyone had a good xmas!  We've been getting lots of feedback about which search engines are performing and which ones are noisy.  To put some vocal minds at ease we've temporarily disabled search results from seedpeer.com, a lot of comments we received said that there were too many dead links turning up.  We'll look at tuning seedpeer results and a/b testing with another popular engine to get things back on track.

Suggestions would be awesome, and thanks to everyone who wrote in to let us know about their experiences with speckly.

uTorrent tip

We've been quietly chipping away at a few exciting things here at Speckly HQ that are in alpha, hope to share them all with you in the coming weeks.

In the meantime we got a question through our UserVoice Feedback Forum that we thought we'd answer here:

"Is there a way to add Speckly to the utorrent UI Extras? In other words, it would be nice to do a Speckly search from within utorrent"

Being big fans of uTorrent we thought we'd share this tip: yes, it is possible to do a Speckly search from inside uTorrent!  Simply follow these steps:

1. Run uTorrent and go to Options->Preferences->Advanced->UI Extras.
2. In the box marked Search Engines enter the following on the first line:
    Speckly|http://www.speckly.com/s?q=
3. Now the default search engine will point to speckly.com; whenever you do a torrent search from inside uTorrent you'll get some nice results from us.

Here's a screenshot to make things clearer, enjoy:

Alpha uTorrent Client for Mac

For those of you who haven't already heard, here is a link to TorrentFreak detailing the release of an alpha version of uTorrent's Client for Mac. What does this mean for the Mac users? Well, Mr. Jobs, and the throng of Apple-geeks, can now claim the smallest footprint Torrent client... is now on the Mac.

[OK, my lame attempt at humor parodying Steve's thinnest, easiest, sexiest, everything-est claims.]

Regardless, we're big fans of uTorrent and happy that they are reaching out to other platforms.