Update on December 15: The Pirate Bay has released its first official statement. The team hasn’t decided yet if the site is coming back.

Update: Readers are reporting that for popular searches there is a clear overlap (identical in most cases) between isoHunt.to and oldpiratebay.org. This shouldn’t be too surprising given how torrent indices are often shared, and that most were sourced from The Pirate Bay in the first place. Again, no site out there right now will be as “good” as The Pirate Bay was before it went down. That said, this story is far from over as we haven’t heard from The Pirate Bay crew … yet.

Torrent site isoHunt appears to have unofficially resurrected The Pirate Bay at oldpiratebay.org. At first glance, The Old Pirate Bay seems to be just a commemorative site for The Pirate Bay, which went down this week after police raided its data center in Sweden. Upon further inspection, however, it turns out the site is serving new content.

Various mirror sites of The Pirate Bay have sprung up since the site’s disappearance, but this one is different. Some alternatives simply provide a copy of The Pirate Bay with no new content (many proxy sites have been doing this for years). Others, like thepiratebay.cr, go further and even provide fake content as if it was new and even attempt to charge users.

The Old Pirate Bay, on the other hand, doesn’t claim to be a resurrection of the site, even though based on searches we conducted and files we tested, that’s exactly what it has managed to achieve. This is much more than just a working archive of The Pirate Bay; it has a functioning search engine, all some of the old listings, and working magnet links. New content is being readily uploaded and downloaded.

Here is isoHunt’s explanation for the launch of The Old Pirate Bay:

As you probably know the beloved Pirate Bay website is gone for now. It’ll be missed. It’ll be remembered as the pilgrim of freedom and possibilities on the web. It’s a symbol of liberty for a generation of internet users. In its honor we are making the oldpiratebay.org search. We, the isohunt.to team, copied the database of Pirate Bay in order to save it for generations of users. Nothing will be forgotten. Keep on believing, keep on sharing.

isoHunt may just be the best group to bring back The Pirate Bay, at least in some form. Launched in 2003 at isohunt.com, it quickly grew to become the third most popular torrent files index and repository by 2008.

After years of legal battles over allegations of copyright infringing activity, isoHunt settled with the MPAA, agreeing to a $110 million reimbursement for damages and the site’s closure, which followed on October 21, 2013. It wasn’t long before clones sprung up and isohunt.to, the isoHunt of today which has no relation to the original isoHunt.com nor its staff, became the de facto replacement of the original site.

Given its roots, it really should be no surprise that isohunt.to decided to launch oldpiratebay.org. Unless The Pirate Bay returns at some point, this appears to be the best alternative, for now.