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Jackett's manual search is so, so good
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
To be clear, this is just a joke, and I don't look down on direct downloading. It absolutely has its place, and sometimes I do it myself if it's just faster to download a file directly. Torrenting is just so much more convenient, though, especially when using Jackett's manual search.
What is Jackett's manual search? Never heard of it.
Jackett is a program that allows you to configure multiple indexers (torrent sites, like 1337x, EZTV, RuTor, Nyaa.si, etc.) in a single interface, that way you can search through all of them at the same time. Jackett, and another program just like it called Prowlarr, is usually used in conjunction with the .arr suite of programs (Radarr, Sonarr, etc.), but it includes a manual search function that allows you to query all the indexers you have set up in the interface at the same time. That's exclusively what I use it for.
So, for example, I have 22 indexers set up in my installation of Jackett. I can use the manual search function to search through all of them at once, then I can sort the results by seeder count, publish date, and file size, and I can filter through the results to find exactly what I'm looking for. Once I've found the file I want, I can copy the magnet link directly from the search results and paste it into Qbittorrent. It's an extremely easy way to find files quickly, and it's much more efficient than manually going to a bunch of different torrent sites to search for a file that might not even be available there. With Jackett, I've literally never once had a case where I wasn't able to find what I was looking for. That's how good it is.
You can take this a step further and use Qbittorrents built in search function to query your jackett indexers. No reason to leave the Qbit webui
I actually have done that, but Qbit's built-in search doesn't have the same search filtering options. For instance, I can't sort torrents by upload date on the Qbit web-ui (this is the most important missing feature, imo), or set it to only search certain indexers and not others, and it has no category related options. It has the essentials, but the Jackett interface is just cleaner and more feature rich in my opinion. That's why I stopped using the Qbit search engine in favor of Jackett.