Each and every day hundreds of millions of people scour their favorite BitTorrent search engines for content to download. But what are all these people looking for? Today we present the BitTorrent Zeitgeist 2011, a list of the 50 most searched for phrases and keywords on one of the most used public BitTorrent indexes during the past year.

During December, all self-respecting search engines produce an overview of the most popular search terms of the past year.

These lists give insight into recent trends, and in 2011 Rebecca Black, Google Plus and Ryan Dunn were the fastest rising searches on Google.

But what about BitTorrent? With billions of searches every year it’s worth taking a look at the most-entered keywords on the dominant file-sharing network.

Unfortunately there is no central database of searches available, but Kat.ph, one of the top 5 torrent sites in terms of visitors, was kind enough to share the most popular search terms of 2011 with us. This list is based on millions of searches and gives an indication of what people were looking for on BitTorrent during the last 12 months.

Interestingly, the most searched for terms are not targeted at specific content, but used to discover files instead. “Ita,” “French” and “2011” make up the top three and are used to find media in Italian, French and from 2011 respectively. The same is true for “DVDrip” and “720p” which are also listed in the top 10.

The first search term related to a specific title is “Thor” in 9th place, a title that also ended up in the most pirated movies list of this year. Movie related searches are clearly the most popular among users of the site as we also find “Harry Potter,” “Kung Fu Panda 2,” “Green Lantern” and “Transformers 3” in the top 20.

Traditionally, TV-shows are also much sought after on BitTorrent as well, and that’s no different this year. “Glee” is the most popular TV-related search phrase in 13th place, followed by “True Blood,” “Game of Thrones,” “How I Met You Mother,” “Supernatural,” “House,” “Dexter” and “Breaking Bad” further down the list.

Besides movies and TV-shows the list is completed with a few unavoidable adult related searches, and the relatively rare software and game related keywords such as “PSP” (11) and “Windows 7” (23). Music isn’t all that popular on public BitTorrent indexes, as we find the first and only artist related search is “Adele” in 44th place.