iDope was designed to serve as a tribute to earlier indexing giants, utilizing a minimalist interface to provide high-speed search results. Unlike traditional directory sites that may host .torrent files on their own servers, iDope operates as a meta-search engine. This means it crawls various databases and the Distributed Hash Table (DHT) network to locate magnet links. Key technical aspects include:

: Since P2P networks are unmoderated, files can be mislabeled or contain malicious software. Verifying the integrity of data through community comments or cryptographic checks is a standard practice.

The sudden shutdown of RARBG in May 2023 sent shockwaves through the ecosystem. RARBG was a primary source of high-quality scene releases. When it died, many meta-indexers like iDope saw a drastic drop in the quality of their search results (missing the unique file encoding RARBG provided). Without quality content, user traffic evaporated.