jasonbarrow.com

Google is by far the most popular and most powerful search engine. You most likely use it to find what you’re looking for on the web, but you might not know about the advanced functions Google has to offer to help in the search process. Function site as ’site’, ‘inurl’, and ‘intitle’ add functionality to Google searches giving you even better results. These advanced functions also opens the door to some very interesting methods of finding whatever you want. I’m going to show you how you can use Google along with some special functions to find free MP3’s that are publicly available to download.

Here is the magic Google search string that you can copy and paste right into Google:
-inurl:htm -inurl:html intitle:"index of" "Last modified" mp3

The goal of that search string is to find indexes of public directories on the internet that contain mp3’s. Using that search string you will find many pages that look similar to this:

As you can see, we got an index of MP3 files. Now that you’ve seen it, it’s time to understand how the search string works. The “intitle” function tells Google to only show us pages that have certain text in the title bar. Since every index page of a directory says “index of” in the title bar, we want to use the intitle function to do that for us. The “-inurl” function tells Google to NOT display results of pages that have certain text in the URL, we could also use the “inurl” function to only include those pages. We only want to see true directory indexes, not pages that pose as directory indexes. Many of those fake index pages are .html and .htm extensions so we will tell Google not to show us those. Lastly we want to tell Google to search for “mp3″ and “Last modified”. Telling Google to search for “Last modified” helps with finding the indexes because every index has that field, and it should be obvious why we’re adding “mp3″ to our search string.

Now that you understand the search string, you can tweak it to be even more powerful. Let’s say that I want to find a specific album, 50 Cent’s ‘Massacre’. All I would have to do is add some search criteria and if the files exist publicly on the internet, Google has probably indexed them. Here’s my search string.
-inurl:htm -inurl:html intitle:"index of" "Last modified" mp3 "50 Cent" massacre

As you can see, I used the search string, checked out a few of the results, and there it was:

You not only can use these advanced Google search string to find virtually any music you want, but find any files on the internet. Let’s say that I want to find some video, let me see if any episodes of The Office are available:
-inurl:htm -inurl:html intitle:"index of" "Last modified" avi "the office"

I enter my search string, searching for ‘avi’ instead of ‘mp3′, and tell Google to find pages that have “the office” in them. As expected, I immediately find this:

As you can see, episodes of The Office and Scrubs in .avi format ready to download for free with a simply Google search. Certainly there are better ways to download music and movies, but this is quick and easy and very interesting if you’re seeing it for the first time.