How does BitSnoop.com do this?

Question

I am very intrigued to know how bitsnoop.com does this...

http://bitsnoop.com/api/trackers.php?hash=98C5C361D0BE5F2A07EA8FA5052E5AA48097E7F6&json=1

It can take in any magnet-uri and return a list of trackers seeders, leechers when found etc...

Could someone please elaborate how this is done, and maybe the first steps to how I could start doing it?!

Thanks

Answer 1

Statistics about a torrent can be received from the tracker. A tracker can either be centralised or decentralised using DHT, distributed hash table. Each tracker negotiates with its peers to send them information about new clients, this is how statistics can be collected. I don't know how to do this but I would start reading about the BitTorrent protocol