Universal - A New Torrent Toolbar For Private Trackers
February 21, 09 by sharky 4,943 views
You know about them. You’ve seen them. You’ve probably even installed them. We’re talking about those dreaded "Torrent Toolbars". Mininova, ThePirateBay, Isohunt, SumoTorrent and every other public tracker you know has conjured up their own modified version of a torrent toolbar. Get the weather, play Sudoku - all while you search for torrents - it’s little surprise as to why they’re avoided.
Under normal circumstances, we wouldn’t go out of our way to promote any toolbar. 99% of them are pure unadulterated junk. However, we’ve found a brand-new toolbar that supports private trackers, without any of the excess baggage. And by the looks of it, the developer obviously put some serious thought into which trackers should be added to the list.
The Universal Toolbar for Torrent Trackers
Universal Toolbar is a toolbar that makes it easy for you to search for torrents from your favourite trackers. There’s no added items on the toolbar - just the search box and a dropdown menu to select from your trackers. A search automatically opens up the chosen tracker - and if you’re already logged in, the search results are immediately displayed.
Security: It only links you to the search page and search for you. Your login information won’t be (cannot be) logged.
Trackers: Presently supports 24 public torrent sites, and 83 private trackers.
For Internet Explorer Only?
Currently, Universal Toolbar is only available for Internet Explorer (on their website), but don’t let that stop you from adding it to Firefox. There’s an "experimental" version of it available here at Mozilla:
— https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10228
NOTE: Since it’s still listed as experimental, you’ll need to login to addons.mozilla.org before being able to download and install it.
Firefox Configuration / Add-Remove Trackers:
After installing (and restarting Firefox), click the Universal Toolbar icon, and select "Options". Here you can configure which trackers will be listed in the dropdown for the search.
Check off each of your trackers, and click the large blue checkmark on the right to save the configuration (it’s saved as a ‘cookie’ on your PC).
Voilà! Much easier than adding multiple search engines one by one to your browser.
©2009 • XHTML • 
01 • asdf Says: 21.02.09 at 7:22 pm
this is already built into firefox. top right. lol
02 • Dizz Says: 21.02.09 at 7:40 pm
seems as tho it might work
03 • wassup Says: 21.02.09 at 9:19 pm
ASDF is right this is built into firefox, and BMTV have a search u can add for it
04 • :S Says: 21.02.09 at 10:12 pm
Maybe they shouldn’t display the Trackers names and just use the abbreviations…:S
05 • Chris Says: 21.02.09 at 11:42 pm
Or, you can just drag the tracker on to your bookmarks toolbar!
WOAH
06 • davey Says: 21.02.09 at 11:49 pm
smely bum
07 • nick Says: 22.02.09 at 12:54 am
dude DONT FALL for it, the obvious is that it HiJACKS ur homepage, and is a slimple MALWARE ploy, dont install, it really might be a TRAP
NO TOP TIER tracker would EVER WANT there tracker in a toolbar, the TL and the good trackers I informed and they ARE PISSED
AVOID like the plauge
08 • monk Says: 22.02.09 at 3:53 am
@nick you are such a spazzz! This a great time saving tool. Quick being a little narc!
09 • a/s/l Says: 22.02.09 at 4:15 am
when will people learn to use “add a keyword for this search” on firefox?
e.g.
1. right click in the search box of your favourite private tracker, select “add a keyword for this search”
2. use anything for the name, it’s not so important
3. use something short and memorable for the keyword, e.g. “wh” for what.cd, “db” for deepbassnine or whatever.
4. now in the address bar if you want to search for something like Minus the Bear in what.cd you can type “wh minus the bear” - hey presto it searches, no addons required and it can all be done from the keyboard (F6 to get to the address bar)
010 • Klos Says: 22.02.09 at 4:45 am
For FireFox, just use the ‘Add to searchbar’-plugin. With that you can add any searchbar you find, from any website (torrentz, TPB, Imdb, Google, opensubtitle, ebay etc) to your normal searchbar in the right-upper corner. Takes no extra space, works like a charm.
011 • Danell Says: 22.02.09 at 5:38 am
Wow it made me happy to see it here =D I worked good to make that toolbar. It’s not only for Firefox… It’s for IE too.
Just to tell you your login won’t be logged because what it does is link you to the page and search for you.
Sure there are other ways to make it easy to search on trackers in Firefox but if you use the toolbar it’s only to install, go to options and set the settings right and your done
real easy.
The website will soon be up with more info.
012 • moggy Says: 22.02.09 at 11:34 pm
just grab Bit Che its better than this
Over 60 sites are supported by Bit Che. More scripts are added all the time.
Visit the Forums for more sites and scripts.
http://www.convivea.com/download.php?id=2
What makes Bit Che so special?
* Super fast torrent searching
* Uses ‘hyper-fetching’ to instantly preview torrent details
* Integrates with any torrent download client (uTorrent, etc)
* Advanced result filtering (duplicates, file size, -keywords)
* Tabbed Searching (Guevara Edition)
* Media Type Searching (Guevara Edition)
* Morning Coffee Extension (Guevara Edition)
* Translated into over 35 languages so far!
013 • Danell Says: 22.02.09 at 11:54 pm
Well with Bit Che you have to install a program and do with a program to search on your torrents and it’s public trackers. Universal Toolbar is for Private trackers and are in your browser and it’s fast too.
I tried Bit Che a while but didn’t like it because it was a big program that I had to use all the time.
Sure Bit Che does meta search but then you can use http://www.meta-torrent.com or any other meta torrent search on the internet.
I’m going to try find a way to make a meta search with private trackers but first I will get Universal Toolbar on it’s feat
014 • aroopk Says: 23.02.09 at 2:27 pm
firefox already has such a feature.. thats why its not there..
015 • Diji1 Says: 24.02.09 at 8:57 am
Actually Bit Che does 66 private trackers last time I looked and that is updated all the time by author and users and is far superior to any meta search website that I know.
Both your toolbar and Bit Che have advantages and disadvantages that I can think of:
-Universal does searches/displays from 1 tracker per page, Bit Che displays all results from all selected trackers on one page (tab) - very different. IMO this is the killer functionality that it has, it saves changing pages or searches - all results from private/public are displayed in one listing with dupes removed.
-Bit Che requires looking for & updating scripts from the forums (if you cant get the script packs heheh) - and scripts become out of date sometimes and need to be updated for site changes.
-Bit Che requires payment for the “Guevara” version - you get several useful features including tabbed searches … of course this doesn’t stop people getting it for free lol.
-Bit Che is a separate application - however your assertion that it’s “big” are completely false, it’s a tiny app and very resource efficient.
For some reason Bit Che isn’t very well known - beats me why, I think it’s excellent. One reason may be that many download sites refuse to hose it due to it’s name.
Still, it’s great that you’ve made Universal Toolbar - a welcome addition to torrent searching for me.
016 • Tom Says: 08.03.09 at 3:50 pm
http://torrent-finder.com