5. Morpheus

Summary: OK I know what you're thinking: why put up with all of that adware? Morpheus started off as a Kazaa knockoff, using the same advertising-supported scheme as Kazaa and Grokster. This got them a reputation for being notorious for adware.

The truth is that Morpheus' new version is only supported by pop-up ads and advertising built into the program (see Figure 4). Although this is annoying, at least Morpheus isn't trying to secretly collect information about you. Morpheus can connect to BitTorrent, Gnutella, eMule, and Neo Networks, which is pretty impressive and results in almost a Swiss Army knife of P2P applications.

Figure 4: Morpheus User Interface (click to enlarge)

Speed: The downloading speed is typically 20-30 kB/s and maxes out around 50 kB/s. Files from a single source only finish about 50% of the time.

Variety of Content: Morpheus was able to find 14 raw DVR-MS files. Considering how rare these files are, that is the most of any search engine style P2P.

Comments: Morpheus' search functionality is great and can run a search within a search and retrieve results quickly. Morpheus charges $20 to remove the advertising from its program. With their new version passing 150 million downloads on Download.com and support for BitTorrent , Morpheus is the current King of P2P sharing. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing time will tell.

For now, Morpheus appears to be behaving except occasional instabilities and the fact that it starts up with your computer by default. It also installed a toolbar on Internet Explorer, which I quickly disabled. Morpheus has cleaned up its act quite a bit, but still has a ways to go.