Google is thought to be the ultimate search engine by many people. Well, I don't know about "Ultimate" but it certainly is a very good search engine wich offers quite a few advanced capabilities. In this article, we will be exploring some of these capabilities in order to find and download MP3 and video files. Of course, what follows is also applicable to any other file types you might be searching for.

First of all, try giving Google the following search string:

-inurl:htm -inurl:html intitle:"index of" "Last modified" mp3

What we do here is using the inurl commands and the term "index of" in order to isolate open directories. We also tell google to look for MP3s in these open directories, by adding the term "mp3" at the end of the search string. You can of course change that to wav, wma or any other format you're interested in. You can also add more terms at the end of the strings, such as "love" for example, if you want to find MP3s that contain the word love in the file name. Instead of love, you can also use the name of an artist or a specific song.

Pretty much the same is true for video files. Instead of "mp3" you can put mpg or avi as the last term of the search string. You may also try

-inurl:htm -inurl:html -inurl:asp intitle:"index of" +(wmv|mpg|avi)

to search for the most popular types of video files.

University servers are famous for two things. Their available bandwidth and the sheer volume of media files that students usually store on them. If you issue the following search string:

-inurl:htm -inurl:html intitle:"index of" "Last modified" mp3 site:edu

You will be searching for MP3 files only on university servers.

Please note that all of the above is legal, as long as the files you download are not protected by copyright. If they are, then maybe you should e-mail the owner of the website and let them know that they shouldn't leave their directory publicly accessible and indexed by search engines! However, most people, especially webmasters, know better and you're unlikely to find copyrighted material ready to be downloaded off the Internet! It is, in fact, very easy to limit open access to your web directories. Most webmasters know how to use the .htaccess file to do just that, and how to use a robots.txt file to prevent search engiens from indexing their directories. If they don't, they shouldn't really be webmasters and they can get into trouble by making copyrighted material publicly available. Finally, make sure that you scan the files you download with an anti-virus program, just to be safe!

Happy Searching!