The Google search engine can be used in many different ways other than your standard search. In this Xombyte I am going to discuss the uses of Google to search for specific files. As an example I will use searching for Mp3 music files.

Paste the following into your Google search box and replace the “filename” to a song name of your choice. You can leave the quotations as this asks Google to return results of the whole phrase within the quotation marks.

-inurl:htm -inurl:html intitle:"index of" mp3 "filename"

Example: -inurl:htm -inurl:html intitle:"index of" mp3 "lil wayne - lollipop"

If in the first instance you do not find the Mp3 you want experiment with way you enter the filename of the Mp3. For example, for the song lollipop by Lil Wayne, we may try “lil wayne – lollipop” or even just “lollipop” or “lil wayne” depending on the extent of the results.

This search syntax can also be applied to other file types; for example to search for videos you may use:

-inurl:htm -inurl:html -inurl:asp intitle:"index of" +(wmv|mpg|avi) + filename

These searches provided direct download links from servers. However not all songs and all files will be available, it just depends on what files are hosted.

It can take some time to get used to searching this way and sifting through the results. Not all the results will give you files you can actually download, but it can be a usefull alternative to peer to peer software.