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Google hack to instantly search for files

Thanks to Jimmy Ruska’s video on YouTube, there are several quirks about phrasing search queries for Google that can find you files in a jiffy. I will detail the method and include it as a Firefox bookmark first, and then I’ll follow up with detailed information on the actual query.

Adding a bookmark

Here’s the process to have a bookmark in Firefox such that you can search for an MP3 song in Google by just typing “music yourSongTitle” in the Firefox address bar.

1. Create a new bookmark

• Select “Bookmarks” from menu.
• Select “Organize Bookmarks…“
• Click on the “New bookmark button” (below the files menu)

2. Fill in the following for the fields in the window that appears

• Name: Enter the name for bookmark. e.g. : Directory Listing
• Location: Here, copy and paste the following Google query (an explanation follows)

“http://www.google.co.in/search?hl=en&q=intitle%3A%22index.of%22
+%28mp3%29+%s+-html+-htm+-php+-jsp&btnG=Google+Search&meta=“

(Include the whole query, without the quotation marks)

• Keyword: This is the word you will use in the address bar to invoke the results for a song title (in our example, it is “music”)
• Description: Give a description or leave empty

3. Now open a new tab and type “music yourSongTitle” and viola! — you will see links of directory listing for the MP3 you wanted

Deciphering the query

The crux of this hack is the clever usage of Google search tags for narrowing the result to only directory listings with keywords “MP3″ and negating results that include html, htm, php or jsp as directory listings.

Here is the break up of the query and the meaning of the tags:

• intitle:”index of”: This searches for the “index of” keyword in title of files. This is usually the directory file that contains the list of all files.
• (MP3): This tag implies a search for files with the keyword “MP3″ in the file name. To add more formats to search, include them separated by the OR (’|') separator.
• %s: This is where the yourSongTitle you enter gets inserted. A clever innovation here is to separate the keywords in your song name with ‘.’ so that single character separations, such as underscores (’_') between words, are also included in results.
• -html -htm -php -jsp: This basically tells the search engine that you don’t want (negate) html, htm, php or jsp files that give directory listings.

You can modify the same query for searching pdfs or any other file format. Also, there are few more keywords to limit the search to a particular site (site:siteName) or a filetype(filetype:pdf). I am no promoter of media piracy and the use of Google tag words makes search all the more effective and productive for daily use. Jimmy has also uploaded a new video on the implementation with few more features on his own site.

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