Isohunt resurrects torrent search site The Pirate Bay

Charlie Osborne
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Days after The Pirate Bay was wiped from the Web, many believed that it was only a matter of time before a carbon copy of the website's database reappeared online. Thanks to The Pirate Bay's database of torrent links being freely available for download, it would only take another organization to upload the site's base and cater for traffic levels in order to resurrect the system.

It seems the game of whack-a-mole with law enforcement is back on, thanks to Isohunt stepping into the breach.

Isohunt, one of many torrent search websites blocked in countries including the United Kingdom, recreated a version of The Pirate Bay over the weekend. In a blog post, Isohunt's operators say that while The Pirate Bay is gone for now, the team created the oldpiratebay.org search in honor of the website which acted as "the symbol for a whole generation of Internet users."

The full declaration is below:

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The organization has also used this scenario to invite former users of The Pirate Bay to join the Isohunt community.

In testing, the search function appears to be working in the same manner as The Pirate Bay once operated, with similar files on offer and what appears to be an active seed and leech community.

The Pirate Bay vanished from the Web last week after law enforcement raided a Stockholm data center. Equipment and servers supporting The Pirate Bay were seized by police in connection to "violations of copyright law," according to Paul Pinter, police national coordinator for Sweden's IP enforcement.

It may have taken longer than users expected for a copy of The Pirate Bay's search function to reappear, but considering the website offered its own magnet link and torrent archive for download in a file packet of less than 100MB, it was only going to be a matter of time.

It seems the battle between law enforcement intent on squashing torrent search websites and the pirate community is back on.

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