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'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.