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

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!

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.

New Function: Exclusion

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.

Now searching NewTorrents

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!

Quick Peek... You asked for it!

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!

Quick Peek

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.

Getting Started with BitTorrent

For those of you new to BitTorrent, we've added a link on the top left of the home page. This page gives you a very brief description of BitTorrent and how to get started. We've tried to keep it as basic as possible, so your first experience with BitTorrent is pleasant.

Let us know if you still have any questions.

150,000+ searches!

In less than a week, we've eclipsed over 150,000 searches!

In that short period, we've received plenty of comments and suggestions. Here are some highlights: