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!
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!
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.
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:
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.
Sometimes, search terms produce too many results. To help you limit your searches, we've launched the Exclusion function "-[term to be excluded]". How does it work? Here's an example:
palin -michael
I'm looking for content with/about Sarah Palin. If I search 'sarah palin', I might miss content that is just described as 'palin'. And if I search 'palin', I will get too many results with 'Michael Palin'. As a Monty Python fan, I'm not one to complain about the results, but I don't particularly feel like looking through all the results to pick out Sarah Palin content. So, if I type "palin -michael", the results will filter out all michael palin results. Although this does not necessarily mean all Michael Palin content is omitted, it does drastically reduce the number of results, and therefore, a higher likelihood that I will get 'sarah palin' content... Unless there happens to be a skit with Sarah Palin and Michael Palin that I'm unaware of...
Hmmm... the Lipstick Pitbull vs. the Killer Bunny.
We've added NewTorrents per user requests. We've also removed Fulldls. We're in the process of testing other BitTorrent sites as well, so you may see some rotation. Why? Have patience grasshopper (For those of you too young to remember or seen the re-runs, check out the TV series, Kung Fu, with David Carradine. It's a classic line from a classic show.)
Let us know what other sites you would like to see by posting at the Speckly UserVoice page.
Cheers!
After launching our Quick Peek a few weeks ago, we had a positive response! A common response was, "Great option, but I didn't even know you had it until yesterday..." I guess we did too good of a job keeping things simple. To remedy that, we've added an simple binocular icon at the end of each listing. Click on that icon and it will launch a Quick Peek of the BitTorrent link. Let us know what you think!
Feel free to post your comments and suggestions on the Speckly UserVoice page.
Enjoy!
Just saw this, but a nice little post about Speckly from the Examiner!
Window shopping?
Sometimes you just want to look without having to go into the store. Since our launch, we've had a number of requests to help sort out the torrents - read the comments, good/bad torrent, weed out fakes or viruses, how many files in the torrent, and so on. Many of the same issues that we deal with ourselves! And so, we've launched our Quick Peek feature.
What is it? It allows you to peek at the site, figure out if this is what you are looking for, and all of this done without navigating away from the Speckly search results. In order to get to Quick Peek, go search a torrent as usual. Your results will appear as usual.
