Did you ever ask yourself how many and which files upload sites like Mediafire host on their servers? Most sites that allow you to upload files to them don't offer a global site search to the public which means that you are left with third-party solutions.
It is actually pretty easy to search these sites using third-party search engines like Bing or Google.
Word of caution: Depending on how the site is set up, it may not reveal hosted files to search engines. There are cases where search engines refuse to index files from file hosting services.
Most search engines share the same search syntax that you can make use of to search a site in their index.
Below is an example of a search on Bing returning more than 250,000 results for mp3 on the site MediaFire. Not all results return mp3 files though as you can see when you look at the first results returned by the search engine.
The general commands to search file hosting sites are the following:
- inurl:extension site:url
- extension site:url
So, to look for mp3 files on example.com you would simply search on Google or another search engine using the following commands:
- inurl:mp3 site:example.com
- mp3 site:example.com
You can of course enter a specific term instead for more specific search results.
- inurl:michael jackson mp3 site:example.com
- michael jackson mp3 site:example.com
You may also use general search terms, e.g. site:example.com to find all indexed pages of the selected hosting provider.
Again, your mileage may vary depending on search engine and file hosting site you are interested in. The files hosted by Mega are not indexed by search engines for instance which means that you cannot use these services to find files hosted on it.
List of extensions
mp3, mp4, mov, mpg, avi, jpg, bmp, zip, rar, pdf, doc
Please note that this is just a selection, you can use your own file types, for instance png, aac or mkv if you prefer to find results for these formats.
It is furthermore possible to only use the inurl: parameter without the site: parameter to run a global search for files or file extensions.
The search inurl:mp3 would return results from across the web matching the search term.
Update: Google and other search engines have made changes to recently that block results from popular file hosting sites from being displayed in the search results.
Search engines displayed thousands of results previously if you used the above technique to find files on popular file hosting sites and sharing websites. If you search now, you will notice that results are limited to less than one hundred and often none at all.
The only viable option is to either use a search engine that is not censoring search results, or to use a specialized file search website to find the files you are looking for.
Most search engines support the same syntax which means that you will get the same results after all. Please note that the hosting sites may block search engines from indexing their contents using various policies. The majority of search engines honor these policies so that contents won't be indexed.
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