One of the few weaknesses of BitTorrent is that it is sometimes hard to find seeds. Bram has decided that his new startup’s first project will be just that:

Whiz kid inventor Bram Cohen and a small cadre of developers and entrepreneurs are in the final stage of launching an advertising-supported search engine dedicated to cataloging and indexing the thousands of movies, music tracks, software programs and other files for download over Cohen’s popular BitTorrent protocol.

The new search engine, which essentially is an agreement with AskJeeves, will go live in 2 weeks. This is an interesting move for Bram. Firstly, by building a BitTorrent search engine he is clearly aiming to solve one of the few oversights in his product and establish his new startup company as a major contender in the P2P arena. However, Bram has always walked a fine line to avoid invoking the wrath of the MPAA/RIAA/Copyright Cabals.

From a legalistic standpoint, search engines are more protected than the “tracker” sites which were summarily shutdown by the MPAA earlier this year (which we reported here along with the hilarious screenshots). Still, we worry that such a search engine will provoke exactly the kind of response that Bram has so skillfully avoided for so long. Good luck dude. You’ll need it.