Top Search Engines for Uploading Sites

Online Storage services, or cyberlockers, like Megaupload, Mediafire, and Rapidshare provide a medium for users to store and share their files. However with the exception of few services, they lack the search capability.

The good news is that there are search sites that crawl for files hosted on online HDDs. Listed below are some of the top search sites that do a good job of searching through various uploading sites.

There’s ton of such sites by the way. I’m only listing ones that are user-friendly, responsive, and good at what they do (w/ little junk files). The list is in no particular order.

Sponsored Tags: download movies for free, file sharing

1. General Files

General Files presents a nice clean interface with listings of popular and recent files. At the time of writing, General Files had crawled over 150 million files. One advantage they have is the shear number of online storage sites they crawl. Glancing at the list of storage services, my guess is that they search virtually all online storages. I also haven’t noticed any ads, yet. The only gripe I have about General Files – and this goes for a few other sites listed here as well – is that the front page is full of “inappropriate” files. I wish they implement some sort of mechanism to filter out files with certain words in them in the future. (tag: download free music)

1. General Search

General Search asked me to review their site. When I visited, I was pleasantly surprised. I haven’t heard of it before, but I found it to be fast and very user-friendly. General-Search is capable of Rapidshare search, Uploading search, and Megaupload search. One of the problems with many of these sites is that the search results are very messy and hard to read; General Search doesn’t have that problem. They feature rating, comment and related files system, which are all nice additions. You can also specify your search by file types, which many sites have.

2. MegaDownload.net

It was a great simple search engine, but now it’s down. I have a feeling it’s permanently gone offline. RIP. It’s back up!

Megadownload.net is one of my favourites. It has a super simple Google-like interface and search results are very well organized and easy on the eyes. It only searches Megaupload and Rapidshare and can’t search for specific file types. Another negative is that I found the site to be unresponsive sometimes (may be all fixed now). But overall, I give it thumbs up due to its clean and thorough search results.

3. FileCrop

I think Filcrop is one of the older ones. Its unique feature is the ability to search by file size. You can give it a range from 0KB to 1 GB. I’m not sure why it’s capped at 1GB though. Filecrop stands out because not only is the search result well organized, but it also lists the blog/forum page where the link was crawled from (this is how most sites do it btw) so that you can visit the page and read more info on the file. Filecrop is definitely one of the best.

4. Gappon

Gappon is an interesting site. Its indexing ability seems to be inferior to others, but it has categorized indexed files into Audio, Video, Games, etc. On top of that it has a page dedicated to TV shows which is simply another category. Gappon gives its users the ability to browse files instead of just searching. Personally, I’d rather use EZTV.IT if I was to download a TV show or NinjaVideo or IceFilms to  stream ‘em.

5. FilesTube

FilesTube, at the time of writing, has almost 50 million files indexed. Plus, it indexes just about every uploading site. You can use the the advanced search function to narrow down your search. You can specify uploading site, size, date, and extension. FilesTube doesn’t bother to categorize files into titles like “Audio” and “Video”. Instead, you’ll have to specify the file’s extension, which is better in some ways. But if you want to search for all the audio files including ogg, flac, and mp3 etc or all the archives (rar and zip), it is a bit of a hassle.

FilesTube also has some side projects which include video (like Youtube), flash games, discussion groups, lyrics, and software sections. FilesTube is a huge site, so there are tons of information and people there.

UPDATE: Megadownload.com (not .net) seems to have gone offline for good. It’s off the list now.

With ever-improving download speeds for even non-registered free users, they’ve become great tools to download what you want. In a way, online storage service has become a viable alternative to P2P softwares such as eMule and BitTorrent.

Thanks for reading all the way down here. ^^ I’ll reward you with a useful tip — well only if you are into foreign music.

The tip is… 4shared.com. It’s another online storage site, but this one has its own search engine, and is generally full of music files — especially Asian music (ie. Korean). Its search engine also understands Asian search terms. General-Search, for example, gives a 503 error when I try to search something in Korean or Chinese. Other search engines listed here all seem to fail, too.

If you know of a search engine capable of searching in Asian characters, please do share. Thanks.

Featured Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/david_a_lea/3219027991/in/photostream/

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