Though application of choice is uTorrent rather than BitTorrent (I assume you mean that you literally use the application named BitTorrent.) When I first started using torrents, many years ago, I used BitTorrent and then switched. I don't even recall why I switched, so don't ask me the difference between the apps.

Yes, there's a crazy mix of people trying to make money from your mouse clicks, like everywhere else on the net. So, if you have av that scans for internet content, it will object to a lot of the stuff you come across.

1) The absolute best way to use it (and it may not be available to you depending) is to find an interest group that caters to the kind of thing that you want to download. An interest group with their own website that lists their own files/trackers for the kind of thing you want.

If for instance you liked anime, one of the cool places you might go is bakabt. They let members (no cost for registration) download (from other memembers, really, since that's how torrents work) anime at really high speeds. The downside is that they keep track of the ratio between your download and upload and they have rules in place to ensure that everyone pulls their weight. It's pretty tricky for me to keep them happy because my connection permits a max upload at about 60kbps while my download is over 1mbps. I have to leave stuff up long after I am done with it, to balance things out.

2) There are also interest groups that don't require membership (and who don't impose upload/download ratio rules) to get to their tracker. Again in the anime genre, nyaa would be a good example of this.

3) Less exclusive than that is a type of interest group that does not have its own tracker. But it publishes links to them as a service. An example of that would be animetake.

4) Last is probably what you've been doing: Format a DuckDuckGo search with the title of what you seek, followed by the word torrent. It is a bit tricky to find what you want that way, sometimes. There are a lot of sites that see you are looking for a torrent and will show up on your search, but they do not have what you seek.

The better way to do this is to remember what site you've had good luck with (like piratebay, for instance) and use their internal search to find what you want.