TorrentRover is a torrent search tool for the Windows desktop.

Do we really need this, we wondered? Surely it’ll be packed with adware? But no, there’s nothing to worry about, it’s portable and payload-free.

The program is very easy to use, too. Enter something in the search box, the program passes your query to a few torrent search engines (PirateBay.se, Kickass.so, BitSnoop.com, isoHunt.to), collects any matches, and sorts them in order of quality. Double-click anything that appeals to open it in your default torrent client.

You could do something similar on the web, but TorrentRover also stores your search locally as a “Rover”. At its simplest, this means you can use it again with a click, no retyping required.

TorrentRover is as easy to use as a web search engine

What’s more interesting is that you can edit these searches. There are options to refine them (search only a particular category of file, or your favourite search engines), to schedule them to run at a particular time, even to automatically download the preferred file.

A “Plugins” menu can run the same search on YouTube, Amazon, eBay, Wikipedia, IMDB, last.fm, MetaCritic, Walmart and Google.

TorrentRover did have one fairly major problem: every time we tried to access the Preferences dialog, it closed down. Uh-oh.

Still, maybe that was an issue specific to our test system. And even if it’s more general, everything else worked just fine, so if you’re interested in this kind of application then we’d say give TorrentRover a try.