For some time, I’ve been sharing a neat hack that I came up with for finding files using Google. Here’s how it works:
Assume you are looking for a specific file, such as northwind.mdb.
- If you enter “northwind”, you’ll find 1,666,000 hits.
- If you enter “northwind.mdb”, you’ll find 186,000 hits (mostly articles talking about northwind.mdb)
To find pages that have the file itself, type the following underlined search …
“index of” northwind.mdb
This returns 712 pages, and you want to look for the ones that begin with “index of”, such as Index of /english_examples/exceltmm/22.
These “index of” pages are simply directory listings from Web servers where directory browsing was enabled. This is generally considered a security hole, but some sites (like .edu sites) leave them open because it’s an easy way to share files.
So, here’s an update to my hack, sent to me anonymously:
intitle:index.of “mp3″ +”Jack Jones” -htm -html -php -asp “Last Modified”
As you can see, this sample is looking for MP3s, and includes “Last Modified” and excludes some noise. It’2013-08-28 18:35:14’s a little cleaner and reduces the chances you’ll return pages that aren’t really directory listings.
Update: Here’s yet another blog posting on how to do this, from Amazon’s official blog …
Note: you shouldn’t download licensed/copyrighted material that doesn’t belong to you.
