How to add search providers to uTorrent's torrent search

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.

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.

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