In this guide, we show you how to find files using the Bing search engine. If you are familiar with our Yahoo! and Google guides, you’ll note that the techniques for finding files are pretty much identical. Bing, as far as the techniques we’re showing you here, are exactly the same. If you haven’t read the other guides, you won’t see a whole lot that is different in the other guides as you do here.
Using Quotation Marks
Quotation marks tell Bing you want explicitly in a search result. Any result that does not contain a result contained in your quoted search query will be discarded. For example:
Search query: pens pencil paper.
Result: Bing will display any page that contains the words pens and/or pencil and/or paper.
Bing may favor results that contain all three, but it isn’t necessarily discarding pages that only contains two of the three results.
Search query: “pens” “pencil” “paper”
Result: Bing will display only results that contains all three words in the result.
Quotation marks can be extended to whole phrases. For example:
Search query: Joe bought groceries
Result: Bing will display results that contain the words Joe and/or bought and/or groceries.
However…
Search query: “Joe bought groceries”
Result: Bing will display results with only that exact phrase (those words in that order).
These concepts can be used to find things like music. To help with results, you can search for things like “MP3″ or the name of a one-click hosting company or cyberlocker.
Search by Filetype
While cyberlockers may show up less in results using this method, it may be possible to find a file through this method. So.
Search query: mp3 [insert artist name here] [insert track name here]
Result: Bing will simply find pages with those words in there.
However…
Search query: filetype:mp3 [insert artist name here] [insert track name here]
Result: Bing will look for any mp3 files with those phrases.
Generally speaking, you’ll probably come across a bunch of FTP sites that is basically a giant directory of files sitting on a server somewhere. Since there is no way of telling half of the time if the FTP was set up accidentally in this manner or intentionally (whether for good or bad purposes), it’s always a good idea to scan anything you download in this manner.
It’s actually interesting what one can find when using a little Boolean in Bing search. This is just one example.