I'm continually surprised that Bittorrent is still relying on content indexing websites. The edonkey community solved this problem years ago with fully distributed search that only relies on the peers themselves[0]. Can anyone with insight into the BT comunity/technology offer any ideas why they never moved in this direction? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kademlia
Their anonymous communication is pretty sketchy security wise, I wouldn't rely on it, but their DHT search is pretty good and their client has some cool features like streaming video too.
The other route I've seen people go is that of ZeroNet where you can have a central authority or a service-based approach like traditional torrent sites, but P2P-based distribution of the site.
Overall, Bittorent sort of has moved in this direction, they've added support for trackerless peering, 3rd parties have created search tools, but I think many people still rely on the websites because they offer additional functionality like malware removal and commenting and popularity in general.
You can see the huge benefit of this pretty easily if you compare bittorrent to other things. Almost every time I download a game or app from usenet, it's got some script kiddie's trojan bound to it. Even from the private ones. On the other hand, with the big public bittorrent indexes that is extremely rare because they tend to get flagged pretty fast due to sheer popularity more than anything else. Only the ZeroNet approach would offer a way to solve this that would be comparable to existing torrent sites today.