We remember the days when Napster and Kazaa ruled over the Buzz. That was only four or five short years ago, but it feels like eons in web time. Peer-to-peer file sharing was damned by the entertainment industry and sued into a dark corner of the Internet. But in the last couple of years, folks who love to download have turned away from P2P sharing in favor of the torrent protocol.

Naturally, movie studios want to stop any sharing of their content, but as with P2P, torrent tracking sites are difficult to stop. Searches on Pirate Bay, a torrent tracking site, surged 133% after the Swedish police absconded with their servers late last week. In response, torrent searchers simply turned their attention to other sites, and we saw increases in buzz on "torrent portal," "isohunt," "demonoid," "torrent reactor," and "mininova." After the rush of traffic on other torrent sites died down a bit, the Pirate Bay came back to life, again proving the futility of trying to quash downloading on the Web.

As for BitTorrent itself, the file-sharing protocol remains popular with Web searchers, safely ensconced in our top 600 searches. It's a male bastion, with dudes accounting for 80% of all BitTorrent interest. Queries follow the well-worn path of file-sharing programs past, spiking every weekend as folks focus on downloading during their time off. Will torrents stay strong and buck the tide of past file-sharing protocols? We'll continue to download the data to see...