Finding Nemo ... err ... what you want (Written By The Icebreaker)
1. Introduction
While using the internet on day-to-day basis, you always have to find something, and it is very fustrating when you just can't find what you are looking for, and you spent hours searching. This quite large article hopefully will teach you how to search effectively and where without major headaches, although in a non-conventional way.
There are many books on searching, most of them are focused totally on the well known Google, but none of them teach you really how to search and also they are mostly about finding vulnerable websites, or files containing sensitive data. This is fine, but finding such things has no use for 80% of the seekers.
During the article I will show to you 4+1 techniques which you can use to find what are you looking for. The techniques are not new, but it seems that they are not well known. Also I need to say that even knowing these you won't be able to find everything, but maybe only 95%.
We have to admit that most people use search engines to find warez material, which includes audio-video files, games and other software, or they are looking for pr0n material. Fortunately there is a small number of individuals who define themselves as hackers or crackers and who use the power of searching to find some more useful things like books. I don't want to open a war between the two camps, but the two terms define the same people, because everyone has both "white" and "black" hat personalities inside. We should name all of them hackers because a good hacker is a good cracker too.
Enough theory about hackers and crackers, because this is a never ending dispute. With our friend Google you can find both kinds of material, including the precious books, but before using it there are always a few more, easier ways to do it. This is what I will discuss first, and only after that we will move to Google.
2. FTP Search
Searching FTP "servers" must be the first thing to do when you try to find something. Nowadays they are considered defunct, but none of the new technologies does the job like the FTP does and always did. Now you will say that is fine, but where you will find "servers"? As with anything there are some FTP Indexers or Search Engines which will help you with that. I want to name particullary two of them which I use regulary.
The first one is Files.lt and the second one is the NAPALM FTP Indexer.
Evil Genious Tip:
To find more FTP Search Engines use Google with these queries (without the quotes):
Now a few notes on how to successfully use the two presented above. With Files.lt you have to possibility to select a filetype, but doing that is not always a wise thing, because some of the data is packed (using zip or another packer). Keep that in your mind when you search, and even misspelling words can help a lot especially when you are looking for something "non-english".
And what if the filetype you want is not on the list? Then you append it to the end of the search query. This one is a must with the NAPALM FTP Indexer, when you want to filter out unwanted file types. There isn't a lot to tell about these kind of indexers because they are pretty straight forward, and they doesn't require any special skills.
Evil Genious Tip:
A few search queries (without the quotes) for Files.lt:
- "game development" (select PDF as filetype)
- "game programming" (select PDF as filetype)
- "elvis presley" (select MP3 as filetype)
A few search queries (without the quotes) for NAPALM FTP Indexer:
- "ice cube mp3"
- "game programming pdf"
- "game programming chm"
One more very important thing about FTP servers is that if you can't download the file right when you have found it, don't throw away the link, because maybe the server is down and maybe you will be able to download the file after a day or two.
I hope that I raised your interest in FTP searching, so don't hesitate, go and give it a try.
3. Rapidshare Search
The first time I saw Rapidshare I was a bit sceptical about it, but that changed after a very short time. Although in my opinion is doesn't worth to pay for the premium services unless you are a warez d00d or a pr0n hungry script kiddie, but that is ust me. Most of the time the free service is more than enough for our well defined purposes.
Well if you are looking for a warez game or a software then this is the first place where you should take a look. Using warez for personal purposes is quite all right in my opinion, and some of us must use warez, because they can't afford to buy quality software at resonable prices. Also I need to confess that a huge number of ebooks also exist on rapidshare, so it is a place for everyone. The so called "rapidshare search engines" are not real ones, they just re-use/re-format the results from normal searches performed using Google or a similar search engine.
You can find lot's of them by using a Google search query like (without the quotes) "rapidshare search engine".The rules defined in the FTP Search section also apply here, and on how to use Google to find stuff on "Rapidshare" you will find out later on. Besides Rapidshare there are other similar services like MegaUpload, which is also worth a try.
4. P2P Search
I won't discuss here about the DC networks and its fellows, however they are still quite popular in Eastern Europe and incorrectly associated with the client software named DC++. Instead I want to talk about Bittorent and eMule.
Like with all the P2P networks warez and pr0n are the most common materials found on these two as well, but this don't have to stop us from finding something really useful.
Because eMule uses the eDonkey and Kad networks it works similary to the clients using the DC and Gnutella networks but the results are much better, possibly because of the higher number of users. Compared to Bittorent the number of relevant results after a search largely depends on the number of peers found nearby, so two searches with different timings can bring up quite different results. eMule is definitely worth a try.
Now when it comes on Bittorent the things are a bit different. Millions of torrents exist, and they can be searched freely, even with Google. Personally I am not a fan of this technology mostly because everything depends on how many users seed the required file(s), and if it is not enough then the speed just sucks. Anyway, besides that, it is absolutely great.
My favorite torrent search engines are IsoHunt.com and TorrentSpy.com and my favorite torrent client software is Bitcomet.
Evil Genious Tip:
To find more Torrent Search engines use a Google query (without the quotes) like this one:
5. Google Search
Now we reached the most interesting part of the article, the actual Google searching. As I said above, first I will show a very simple way on how to search Rapidshare or similar services for files.
A simple query like this one: site:rapidshare.de "prince of persia" can do the job extremely well, and the number of results is not that big, so you can easily select one, and download the needed file(s). To apply this for searching other similar services, just change the "rapidshare.de" to "megaupload.com" for instance. (By the way Prince of Persia is a great game, it is really worth buying.)
(HTML dump converter's note: megaupload.com went out with a bang in 2012 and is no longer operational. https://mega.co.nz/ was launched in its stead, but operates differently.)
Now let's see, how we can bring-up torrents using Google. This is also quite simple, "prince of persia" ".torrent". The first part can be replaced with the desired string and off we go.
As you can see, Google is our multi-purpose tool for searching, but only now comes the real digging. The "intitle:index.of "parent directory"" searching technique became very popular, and now it is exploited by numerous website who include the "index.of "parent directory"" in their title and body, but again this don't have to stop us, to find what we need.
I will demonstrate my modified version of this technique to find some books and music files. Our first query will look like this one, of course without the quotes: "intitle:index.of "ebook" opengl pdf OR chm -asp -php -html -html -faq -linux".
As you can see we could even use "I'm feeling lucky" because the first results is already a good hit. This one will search for eBooks in PDF or CHM file formats, and we also exclude a lot of stuff which could bring us false results. A slightly modified version of this query could be intitle:index.of "parent directory" ebook opengl pdf OR chm -asp -php -html -html -faq -linux. However the first hit is the same, this one brings slightly different results.
When it comes on Google searching you have to be inventive to reveal new stuff. Okay, enough books, let's find some good music. Here is a sample query: intitle:index.of "parent directory" ai otsuka mp3 OR m4a OR ogg. What this will do? Well it will search within the "parent directory" results for the "ai otsuka" (Japanese female pop singer) string, and for MP3 or M4A or OGG file types.
Enough Googling ... Go and take a well deserved break.
6. Audio-Video Search
I wanted to include this because it is a new technology. Here I want to name two search engines which search inside the audio-video files for recognizable text patterns, with bigger or small success.
The first one is Blinkx.com and the second one is Podzinger.com. Give them a try, especially if you are looking for podcasts with the same topic.
We reached the end of the article ... Thank you for reading and Good Night.