I am old enough to remember when all torrenting was decentralized (edonkey, imesh, napster and million others). Then, all of a sudden, everyone switched to torrents, that rely on [centralized] web sites for search. I guess convenience always beats privacy.

It doesn't (strictly) need to have centralized search; you can passively collect info from the DHT swarm and build up an index over time of torrents people are sharing.

It's not as convenient as something like napster or the like, but we've also got this draft <http://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0051.html> to make it a bit better.

For anyone wanting to pursue this, I feel like I can share, I used this recently https://github.com/boramalper/magnetico, people share database dumps regularly. I found ~4 DB dumps and merging scripts are all you need to get up and running.