MiniNova Updates Website

The popular torrent indexing site has received a new upgrade.

Note: This is an article I wrote that was published elsewhere first. It has been republished here for archival purposes

With an interface upgrade, and numerous bug fixes – and promise of more bug fixes in the future – the indexing site gives casual BitTorrent users another reason to use the site.

A few downplayed rumors surfaced here and there that indicated Mininova was ‘censoring’ its search results with specific keywords in its search feature. The community response to these rumors blamed a probable bug in the software rather than active censoring. The response was definitely correct, as it turns out.

“Some people noticed that specific search queries return wrong results. For example, searching on “French” only returns old torrents.” Mininova explained in their blog entry, “We hope to fix this issue in a few days.”

Other issues included that the beginning of a word would not yield the remaining word in search results. For example, a search query “Lin” would not return a result with the word “Linux” in it. Known as prefix searching, MiniNova explained that with their current searching back end Sphinx, this would not be possible. Nevertheless, Mininova promised to fix this issue sometime later in January.

With the new interface that was previously only available as a sneak peek before now installed, it looks like MiniNova has become a better torrent indexing site.

Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Google+.