Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Download MP3s via Google Search

I start with a disclaimer: I do not advocate piracy nor support it. Whatever you learn from this and how you apply it to your benefit/misfit is completely beyond the purpose of this article. Be responsible for your actions or inactions :P

OK. Sigh of relief. Now lets start.

A day ago, a friend (see Frank's Blog) sent an email about how one can get files directly using google's advance search techniques. This applies to movies, documents or virtually any file that google may have inside it's crawled database. How this search works. Lets see the contexts or slap this line inside google's search tab:

-inurl:htm -inurl:html intitle:"index of" mp3 "ziggy marley"

The exact same line above will return sites that have MP3 extensions that contain the words "ziggy" & "marley". The "-inurl:htm and -inurl:html" tells google to look for the extensions within HTML documents only (you could also add -inurl:asp or -inurl:aspx). These are pages that google crawls which can also include text or PDFs or whatever that's text or alike.

Now, the intitle: switch searches documents that match the HTML tag TITLE. In the above example, "index of" is a typical directory browsing format which in normal cases are file repositories using HTTP. If you for instance, upload a bunch of files inside a website and do not specify a "start page" or restrict browsing access to that directory, your webserver will automatically or dynamically return a html or htm document listing all files in that directory in unix style.

So, to translate the above query into english would be something like this. Hey google, search for mp3s containing words ziggy and marley within html or htm documents which have a title of "index of" or a directory browsing format.

Now, use only your imagination to figure out what more you can do with this.

For guided google's advance searching, go to www.google.com/advance_search or for help on switches using standard searches go to http://www.google.com/help/operators.html

Happy fishing.

1 comment:

crash7 said...

whoop-a-did-doo!! im the first to leave a comment on Mr.Willie's blog!! anyway this tip is quite neat.. although it not always lands the search on the desired MP3, its at least something for cheapskates like me out there... :)