If you’ve ever played around with a search engine, you’ve likely discovered that many people keep a lot of their files online in such a way that makes them searchable and available to the public. Search engines like Google are continually crawling the Web, and they catalog a lot of personal file collections, including music and video. This means that you can do a Google search and turn up a lot of unprotected music that you can download for free.
Of course, it goes without saying that you wouldn’t want to download music illegally. But legal or not, there are a lot of tunes out there at your fingertips if you know how to search. At least one search engine, Altavista, even has an option to search exclusively for audio files. I have found this service a very handy way to search for sound bites and other audio clips, but you can also find songs, videos, ebooks, etc. You can even harness the more powerful Google search engine with the proper search terms. For example, this search will turn up the index of any folder with the tile of “audio” or “music” that contains .mp3 or .wav files contining the term “Beatles.”
-inurl:htm -inurl:html intitle:”index of” +(“/music”|”/audio”) +(.mp3|.wav) +Beatles “Last Modified”
You could play around with those terms to get results for different bands, formats, or other search terms. There are even sites that will do the fancy search terms for you. This is just a simple way that you can put these powerful tools to use.
