MyBittorrent is familiar name to most in the BitTorrent community, so it came as a surprise when the site shut down this summer. After a dispute concerning the site's future, the two founders agreed to go their separate ways and close the site. One of them has now returned with a brand new torrent search engine.

Founded in early 2004, myBittorrent grew to become a prominent and well-established torrent site over the next few years. The site had been flying under the radar for a long time and didn’t run into any legal troubles, but it did have a serious dispute with its domain registrar, GoDaddy, in 2006.

After receiving a complaint from Microsoft, GoDaddy temporary hijacked the myBittorrent domain, but after emails back and forth the owners managed to regain control. In the years that followed the two founders continued business as usual, frequently changing the look and layout of the site.

In fact, the two changed plans so often that they never really managed to add new features to the site. “Instead of adding new things we were always spending time on fixing features that used to work just fine,” Rex, one of the site’s founders told TorrentFreak.

Nevertheless, myBittorrent grew out to become one of the largest torrent sites, serving torrents to millions of visitors every month. This popularity, together with the increased legal pressure against fellow torrent sites such as The Pirate Bay and Mininova, raised doubts with Rex’s partner, who wanted to scale down.

Eventually this led to a rift between the two owners. Rex wanted to continue with the site, but his partner opted to close down the operation permanently. To resolve the dispute the two decided to go their separate ways. This summer myBittorrent was shut down for good, but not before a replacement was in place.

To fill the gap left by myBitTorrent, Rex launched a new site under a new name – yourBittorrent.

“The biggest difference between both sites is that yourBittorrent has verified and adult torrents,” Rex told TorrentFreak, adding that he plans to include many new features in the near future, including an integrated subtitle search engine.

“YourBittorrent will soon have a few million subtitles and IMDB-links linked to all movies and TV-shows. The advanced search will also be extended to allow people to look for subtitles. YourBittorrent is going to be the first site where you can do that,” Rex said.

Another key feature is that the site will verify torrents to prevent the appearance of fake files and spam. “YourBittorrent has its own verification system with 60,000 verified torrents, and unlike some other torrent sites, we do take measures against fake files,” Rex told TorrentFreak.

Thus far 2009 has not been the best year for BitTorrent. Many sites have gone down or received negative verdicts in court, so it’s good to see that yourBittorrent continues where myBittorrent left off.