How to add search providers to uTorrent's torrent search

Martin Brinkmann
Jul 28, 2012
Updated • Mar 2, 2019
File Sharing, Tutorials
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19

Despite the route that uTorrent has been taken in the last year or so, it is still one of the most popular Bittorrent clients on today's Internet.

When you look at the feature set you will notice that some of them are not really that well known in comparison to others. While you probably know about the uTorrent apps store or uTorrent Plus, you may not know that you can use uTorrent to search popular torrent websites.

When you look at the client's top right corner you will notice the search form there.

Note that the interface changed a bit in newer releases. It looks like this instead.

While it may look on first glance as if this is a search for local torrents that are currently processed by the client, it is in fact a torrent search engine that allows you to search various online torrent indexing websites from within the Bittorrent client.

All you need to do is type a search term into the form and either hit the enter key right away to search the default torrent search engine, or click on the down arrow next to the search icon to pick one of the available search engines from the list.

The results open in the default browser, and not in uTorrent, however.

By default, only BitTorrent and Mininova are available. Note: The list varies depending on the version of uTorrent, and it may even be empty.

A click on manage search providers opens a configuration menu that you can use of to add or remove torrent search engines from the program.

torrent search engines

To add a search engine you first need to know its search url.

  1. Visit the torrent search engines's website and search for TEST or another phrase that you can easily identify.
  2. Look at the web address of the results page.
  3. A search for test on the Piratebay for instance displays the following web address http://thepiratebay.se/search/test/0/99/0
  4. For most search engines, do the following:
    1. All you need to do know is to remove everything after search from the address, e.g. http://thepiratebay.se/search/
    2. You may also use http://thepiratebay.se/search/%s instead.
    3. Add a name, and the address to uTorrent's Search Engines dialog.
    4. Make sure both are separated by a pipe character |.
  5. Some search engines require that you keep certain parts of the URL after search.
    1. Use the variable %s to replace the search term and keep the full URL in that case, e.g. http://thepiratebay.se/search/%s/0/99/0

For the Piratebay, you would add Piratebay|http://thepiratebay.se/search/ to uTorrent's list of search engines. You should not have any issues adding public torrent search engines to uTorrent.  Please note that searches are opened in the default system browser and not in uTorrent directly.

It is suggested that you test the new search engine right away. If searches open properly, you have added the new torrent search engine correctly to the uTorrent client. If you run into issues, for instance "not found" pages when you run searches, something is not right with the search URL.

Tip: Another parameter that is supported is %v which adds the client user agent ID to the saerch. You may add blank lines in the search management interface to add separators.

Have another uTorrent tip that you would like to share? Feel free to leave a comment below.

Summary
How to add search providers to uTorrent's torrent search
Article Name
How to add search providers to uTorrent's torrent search
Description
Find out how to add new torrent search engines to the uTorrent BitTorrent client using built-in functionality to run searches directly from the client.
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Ghacks Technology News
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Comments

  1. TWAU said on January 3, 2020 at 2:00 am
    Reply

    Is there a way to change the characters spaces become in the search?

    For example:
    [1337x|https://***.to/search/%s/1/] with Star Wars put into search engine returns https://***.to/search/star%20wars/1/ when the proper space symbol for 1337x URLs is [+] not %20.

    I know the easy work around is just add [+] sign to any multi-word search, but curious if there’s a work around.

  2. Deanna said on March 1, 2019 at 9:31 pm
    Reply

    Hi there, this is the web address for a search at 1337X:

    https://1337x.to/search/TEST/1/

    But adding https://1337x.to/search/ to uTorrent doesn’t work. This is the resulting web address and gets a 404 error:

    https://1337x.to/search/TEST

    You can see the ending /1/ is missing. Is there some way to use a wildcard for the search term when adding a search engine to uTorrent? Or does this mean 1337X can’t be added?

    1. Martin Brinkmann said on March 2, 2019 at 8:03 am
      Reply

      I have updated the guide. You can replace the search term with %s, so that you would end up adding https://1337x.to/search/%s/1/ to uTorrent.

      1. Nicholas said on August 9, 2020 at 12:20 am
        Reply

        thank you. its working.

      2. Kant Tellya said on February 9, 2020 at 1:27 am
        Reply

        Works perfect … Thank you

  3. Kizzy said on November 10, 2017 at 5:54 pm
    Reply

    How do I use periods in my search parameters? I tried quotation marks but it removes the periods as well. trying to search for S.W.A.T.

  4. watty said on October 21, 2017 at 1:05 am
    Reply

    how to i launch patch….there is no instruction …the patch doesnt do anything

  5. Anonymous said on September 29, 2016 at 8:26 pm
    Reply

    thank you all for your links

  6. Annoymous said on March 16, 2013 at 8:17 am
    Reply

    Here’s one for Google that searches for magnet links:

    Google Magnet Search|http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=lang_en&as_q=%22magnet:?xt=urn:btih:%22*

    so far it has worked well.

  7. Krishna said on January 7, 2013 at 9:09 pm
    Reply

    Here’s some more:

    KAT|https://kat.ph/torrents/usearch/?q=
    IsoHunt|https://isohunt.com/torrents.php?ext=&op=and&ihq=
    PirateBay|https://thepiratebay.org/search/
    Torrentz|https://www.torrentz.com/search?q=
    BitSnoop|http://bitsnoop.com/search/all/
    Vertor|http://www.vertor.com/index.php?mod=search&search=&words=
    Podtropolis|http://www.podtropolis.com/torrents-search.php?search=
    Coda.fm|http://coda.fm/albums/search?query=
    Take.fm|http://take.fm/movies/search?query=
    YIFY|http://www.yify-torrents.com/browse-movie/

  8. Martin Brinkmann said on January 7, 2013 at 3:42 pm
    Reply
  9. thetruth said on January 7, 2013 at 3:36 pm
    Reply

    How do I add KickassTorrents?

    1. Sophia G. Dierdorf said on January 19, 2015 at 12:24 pm
      Reply

      Kickass|https://kickass.so/usearch/

  10. Mars said on November 4, 2012 at 3:20 pm
    Reply

    Sorry, missed the slash for torrents.to, it is

    Torrents|http://torrents.to/search/

  11. Krishna said on July 30, 2012 at 11:03 am
    Reply

    There is also a similar article with more details. Those interested can visit:

    http://www.techsupportalert.com/%20utorrent-help-using-utorrent-torrent-search

  12. jmjsquared said on July 29, 2012 at 4:56 pm
    Reply

    Thank you, sir.
    The *name* of the search site is necessary if you want ųTorrent to display its name in the menu AND the bar * | * is critical, otherwise you’ll get a “403 Error”.
    Here is my favorite: Torrentz|http://torrentz.eu/search?f=%s

    And a couple others:
    Google|http://google.com/search?q=filetype%3Atorrent+
    Vuze|http://search.vuze.com/xsearch/?q=

    Here’s hoping we can include Demonoid again very, very soon.

    1. square said on December 4, 2017 at 2:54 am
      Reply

      You’re awesome, I’d have never figured this out.

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