We all know how useful Google is in finding stuff but most of us don’t know that there is much more to Google than meets the eye. To harness the full power of Google you need to speak a special language, special commands you type in the Google search box to expand it’s functionality. I’m going to show you one such string of commands that will command Google to go forth and search the Interwebs for MP3’s, yes free music! I’ll start off by giving you the entire string of commands to instruct google to search for MP3 files.
To start searching just click on the link below and it will launch a new window or tab and paste the magic code into the Google Search bar on the google.com website. Once you have done this simple add the name of the artist or song to the end of the query. To search for ALL mp3’s don’t add anything but just click search. Ok here is the magic link:
-inurl:htm -inurl:html intitle:"index of" "Last modified" mp3
If you want to save the files to your hard drive then right click on the link and do a “save as” or “save link as”. Clicking on any MP3 file will probably bring up some kind of mp3 player in your browser or launch Itunes, Realplayer or Xmms.
If you want to actuall learn something from this article you can carry on reading below where I’ll explain what each of the commands do. If not, happy searching and come back soon for the next installment where I’ll show you more google hoonage!
Here is an additional string you can give to google. It’s similar to the one above but may get you more music.
intitle:index.of +”last modified” +”parent directory” +(mp3|wma|ogg) +"" -htm -html -php -asp
Explanation of the query we give to Google
Well start off by telling google what we don’t want to find -inurl:htm -inurl:html
The command inurl:html tells Google to look for files that have html in their url and in this case the minus sign just means omitt those files. So here we’re asking Google to look for all file that aren’t proper web page that end in .htm or .html
Next we give google a intitle:”index of”. This intitle: command instructs Google to look at the title tag of the web page. If the page is just a directory listing, a page that just lists a whole lot of files, not a proper webpage as such then it will normally have “index of” in it’s title.
Then we give it a “Last modified” This is also a function of a web server. When a webserver generates a list of files in a directory on the server the page it generates will contain the words “Last Modified”
Finally the magic command mp3 All this means is look for anything that contains the letters mp3.
Obligitory warning: Most of the music you find using this method is still governed by the copyright holders (big greedy record companies) so if someone uploads their entire music collection to a directory on a webserver that Google has crawled then 1) it’s not legal for them to do so 2) it’s not legal for you to download and 3) we thank them for their folly!