FINDING A FILE SHARING SITE

---

Normally when you want to find something on the Internet, you can use a search engine such as Google or Yahoo! While search engines can find a list of potential sites to visit, you may have to visit several different sites just to find one that isn’t shut down, especially if you’re looking for illegal music files, software, or full-length movies.

If you’re lucky enough to find a website that contains what you want, you may have to wade through several layers of pop-up ads trying to entice you into looking at pictures of naked celebrities having sex (like who cares). Finally, you find a file that you want to download, but the link is dead, so you have to visit another website. Repeat this process several more times, and you can see why the recording industry views web and FTP sites as only a minor threat to their profit margins compared to the danger that file sharing networks pose.

Fortunately, there are faster, less frustrating ways to find what you want on the Internet. Rather than waste time browsing multiple sites listed by a single search engine, use a specialized search engine or a multi–search engine program to query multiple search engines simultaneously.

SPECIALIZED SEARCH ENGINES

If you type the string mp3 in a search engine, chances are good that you’ll find not only websites that offer MP3 files, but also newspaper articles about MP3 files, programs for creating MP3 files, and even pornographic sites that use popular search strings like mp3 to entice people to take a peek at what they have to offer.

To avoid bombarding you with a list of irrelevant websites, many search engines allow you to search only for MP3 files related to what you want to find, as shown in Figure 5-3.

Figure 5-3: By narrowing your search just for MP3 files within a search engine, you can quickly find illegally traded music files on the Internet.

To find music files on the Internet, visit one of these specialized search engines:

MP3.box http://mp3.box.sk

Big Search Engine Index http://www.search-engine-index.co.uk

Music Search Engine http://mp3-music-search-engines.com

SongCrawler http://songcrawler.com

MP3 FILE FINDING PROGRAMS

You can also use specialized MP3 file searching programs to find the music files you want. Simply enter a song title or recording artist’s name into one of these file searching programs, and the program searches multiple MP3 search engines for you and shows you the addresses of the web or FTP sites where you can get the file you want (see Figure 5-4).

Figure 5-4: File finding programs can locate MP3 files on both web and FTP sites.

While specialized music search engines can often find MP3 files stored on websites, MP3 file finding programs are better for finding music files stored on FTP sites. These are some popular MP3 file finding programs:

2 Find MP3 http://www.npssoftware.com/2findmp3

WinMP3Locator http://www.winmp3locator.com

Advanced MP3 Search http://www.search-mp3.org

MediaGrab http://www.eastbaytech.com

---