Search powerhouse Google has captured millions if not billions of internet users’ attention and replaced the likes of Yahoo, MSN, WebCrawler, and Alta Vista as their search engine of choice. You probably have visited Google at least once today. If you’re like me, you may even use Google as your home page.

Do you cringe when you hear phrases like “search operators”? Well, this nerdy tip may sound intimidating, but you can use search operators with Google to help find web sites with mp3’s of your favorite songs.

Simply search like this:

inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:”index of” +”last modified” +”parent directory” +description +size +(wma|mp3|aac|m4a|mp4|ogg) “Panic! At the Disco”

Now for an explanation:

  • inurl:(htm|html|php) tells the search to look for URLs that end in htm, html, or php. This eliminates a lot of lyrics sites and gets you to the goods.
  • intitle:”index of” tells the search to look at the title of the page and look for the phrase “index of” – because on most Apache or *nix-based servers, this is in the title of a directory or folder listing when someone forgets that their music files are accessible to their web server. Some file-sharing clients like Limewire also make this available.
  • +(wma|mp3|aac|m4a|mp4|ogg) tells the search to look for these types of files on the pages it searches through. So far, that should mean we are only getting directory or file folders that list music files. If you were looking for software, you might look for ZIP or DMG or ISO or EXE (be careful what you download though, and always do a virus scan!).
  • “Panic! At the Disco” – an excellent band, in my opinion. However, you could search for any band, or any song, or any album, for that matter.

There are a lot of ways to modify these search operators to get the results you want. YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary). And for legal reasons, I need to remind you not to download music you do not own that is copyrighted. Support your favorite artists and buy their albums legitimately. And as always, surf smart – don’t click on anything that looks suspicious and never download any programs or plugins from unknown sources. Run a virus check on all files that you download.

Thanks to Lifehacker, the source of this information.