Recently I've been featured in many sites for my youtube video "google is better than limewire for downloading mp3s". It's gotten over 500,000 views in youtube and about 1 million in break.com . If you hadn't seen it here it is:
I received a few emails from Emmanuel Paquette asking how this works. He said it'd be for a french newspaper at lesechos.fr. Apparently it ended up in ft.com, the financial times website in english with the title youtube video embarrasses google. I wasn't told it would be published in english in a high profile site of investing news much less the aggressive title. I made it very clear in my emails that google was correct in the description that google does not guarantee anything with this search because it doesn't look for mp3s, just the word "mp3". Mr. Paquette didn't really seem to understand how it worked or google's explanation that was given to him.
The title is deceiving. Google owns youtube and would have deleted my video and my account is it felt I was in anyway embarrassing them. In fact, they'd delete my adsense account and gmail account too if they thought I in any way caused them bad PR.
Google Doesn't care and Rightfully so
The search isn't guaranteed to do anything except search pages with the word mp3 in them. The additional query modifiers just target directories. If the people don't want those directories to be crawled they need to enable robots.txt or a rel=nofollow attribute to all links directed at files in that directory. You could easily find a directory that had somesong_mp3.txt or directories with no mp3s but the keyword mp3s somewhere in the title of the documents. It's not a perfect search and it really doesn't replace p2p, but it does work efficiently and probably even faster than p2p for common songs.
Google doesn't own a pay to listen music site
If more people use google to download mp3s it doesn't affect google but it affects its competitors. Many people are scared to use p2p networks to download music but they don't have that sort of negative associations towards google. If more people see they can download music illegally from google rather than download the itunes client, enter their credit card number and pay a dollar a song, there will be those that switch to downloading music from google. Especially youthes that are dependent on their parents for money. As a side effect many people will start using google to download mp3s which means a loss in revenue from google's competitors like music.msn.com and music.yahoo.com. I sent theses comments to the writer of the article but I didn't get any response. Either way, the catchy headline probably helped spread the word and ultimately provided more good PR for Google.
The Emails
Emmanuel
OK. Can I ask you: how old are you and what is your job? I ask an answer of Google. They answered me today:
Google provides the filetype: operator to search for different type of files. For example, the search filetype:ppt google will return PowerPoint files with the word "Google" in them.
Out of respect for intellectual property, Google disables the filetype: command for MP3 files. The command that you sent is an attempt to find web pages that have a list of files and that have the word "mp3" on the page somewhere. Of course, queries like this are not guaranteed to find MP3s, because many innocent web pages might have "index" in the title of the page and the word "MP3" somewhere on the page.
What do you think?
Jimmy Ruska
What exactly are you looking to research? I don't understand your intentions. Google is very correct in their response. I'm 21, and I own JimmyR.com, JimmyR.com/blog/, Eliteskills.com . and buildquiz.com . I get money from the google adsense money I earn in ads.
Emmanuel
Sorry I received your email but I do not understand this sentence by Google: Out of respect for intellectual property, Google disables the filetype: command for MP3 files. How does it means?
Jimmy Ruska
Par respect pour propriété intellectuelle, Google desactive le fonction "filetype:" pour cherche les fichiers .MP3. Par example "filetype:mp3" ne fait rien mais "filetype:pdf", "filetype:txt" ou quelque autre type fonctionne.
My method does its best to find directories without an index and thereby increases that chance of finding mp3s, however I would still find results for something like songname_mp3.txt . Mp3s that are linked but not in a directory are not found. The search still works great for common songs. This is the improved query
"no one knows" intitle:"index.of" "parent directory" "size" "last modified" "description" [snd] (mp4|mp3|avi|ogg|wmv|mov) -inurl:(asp|jsp|php|html|htm|cf|shtml|asp)
"no one knows" - nom de la chanson intitle:"index.of" "parent directory" "size" "last modified" "description" [snd] - suelement fichiers, ca quite le spam aussi (mp4|mp3|avi|ogg|wmv|mov) - le type du fichier que je veu -inurl:(asp|jsp|php|html|htm|cf|shtml|asp) - I want only folders.
Emmanuel
Thansk for the translation but what i did not understand is why they disables the filetype: command for MP3 file? Is it OK if I quote you?
The "index.of" trick is an old one. However, the modifications to the actual query are what makes it viable as they remove spam and are more likely to find an actual song.
> i did not understand is why they disables the filetype: command for MP3 file? Because many mp3s are not supposed to be shared without purchasing the original CD. It is illegal to redistribute the songs. If filetype:mp3 were enabled by google many sites hosting mp3s would be crashed as they wouldn't be able to handle the bandwidth of being the first result.
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