isoHunt is a search engine, which most of the others are not. We go out and index the torrents on other BitTorrent trackers, including MiniNova, LegalTorrent.com and others: sites with Creative Commons-licensed music, as well as BitTorrent sites with just Linux and open-source software.
As a search engine, we don't host torrents, nor do we edit or categorize them. We just link back to the sites hosting the torrents, as well as cache a copy of those torrents.
If you go to Google and type in a TV show's name and add "filetype:torrent" you will see torrents, too.
I don't think isoHunt would be better as a directory. You saw the competition between directories versus search engines: Yahoo versus Google. We all know how that went.
How big is IsoHunt today? We get 30 million unique visitors a month. And I think we are the largest site in terms of quality and quantity of torrent files in our index.