FrostWire 5.1.x – A new era for BitTorrent Search

Download FrostWire 5.1.x

We heard the confusion and the complains on how FrostWire 5 search results work and we decided to take it up a notch (out of many many to come)

The next series of FrostWire 5.1.x improves the way files are found on the BitTorrent network.

In short 2 things have happened:

1. FrostWire now finds single files that match your searches.

2. FrostWire learns as you use it to deliver instant single file search results (under 100ms on average, but you’ll see a lot of search results appearing under 5ms)

Getting a little more into details:

FrostWire performs a Smart Search upon the most relevant torrent search results that come from BitTorrent search engines, meaning it remembers every file contained by every torrent it scans increasing greatly the chance to find what you are looking for, super fast.

As FrostWire fetches search results from the search engines, it uses these results to crawl the Azureus DHT to learn
about the contents indexed by these torrents. FrostWire will not use the bandwidth of the search engines in this process,
it will only use the torrent info hash to perform DHT queries, meaning, .torrent files are fetched only from the DHT, not from search engine’s web servers, it’s searching powers will not depend from a central entity.

So…

The more you use FrostWire the more it learns about the contents available on the BitTorrent network.

The more you use FrostWire the faster search results will be.

We believe now FrostWire is one of the most powerful information discovery tools ever created, on it’s path to becoming a distributed file search engine. In fact, we’re now fully confident that getting rid of gnutella was the right choice since you will see that the effectiveness of 5.1.x when it comes to search makes Gnutella irrelevant, specially to find and seed rare content. This is the FrostWIre we always dreamed of building and there’s so much more coming.

Other than performance and numerous user experience upgrades that you will probably notice we’ve added a new little search engine by popular demand, TPB.

In the near future we’ll be adding tools to export the Smart Search database, and to import and merge Smart Search databases from other computers.

CHANGELOG


frostwire (5.1.5) stable; urgency=high

* Bug fix on setup wizard for some window configurations where controls
would not appear unless the user resized the window.
* Bug fix on keyword search filter, wrong keyboard event was being used.
* UX adjustement in the way transfers are sorted when the application is
launched.
* UX upgrade where Search Field on the Library now reacts to the DELETE key.
* UX upgrade where the FrostWire left hand side components are laid out
correctly after the user resizes the window from much smaller dimensions.

-- FrostWire Team Fri, 16 Sep 2011 18:1:34 -0500

frostwire (5.1.4) stable; urgency=high

* Bug fix where it would not index torrents when the
file type filter was in use.
* Bug fix when downloading a secondary file from the second torrent
download would not start and would appear as seeding.
* Cleans all empty folders created by a partial download once the download
is removed from the transfer manager.
* Fixes issue with transfer manager resetting the order of columns.

-- FrostWire Team Wed, 24 Aug 2011 00:57:38 -0500

frostwire (5.1.3) stable; urgency=high

* Search results now arrive under 200ms, aka, Instant Search.
* New FrostWire "Smart Torrent" search. FrostWire will search inside
top matching torrents for individual files matching the current query.
* Core upgrade, if a .torrent fails to download from its HTTP location
FrostWire will download it from the DHT if it can find it there.
* Functionality to see the size of the Search DB and to reset it.
* UX upgrade, ability to hide/show seeding torrents on transfer manager.
* UX upgrade, Phone & Tablets desktop explorer asks before deleting files.
* UX upgrade, New file "Extension" column on search results.
* UX upgrade, Search tabs now have animated indicator to let user know
a search is still going on.
* UX upgrade, New filter by file type. Filter controls re-arranged.
* UX fix, search results can now be sorted by file type.
* TPB has been added to the list of search engines.
* Mininova is back.