Two ways to hone your Google fu

Spring is in the air, which means we’re left with a dearth of things to write about while companies fall silent to wind up for the summer months. Why not spend this quiet time improving your Google fu? Here are a few options to get ‘er done.

Google Torrent Search

As The Pirate Bay’s founders received their penalty on Friday, they used their closing arguments to touch on Google’s role in piracy. The patch-wearing lads asserted that The Pirate Bay, like Google, merely indexes illicit content, but does not host any of the material itself. Ben Edelman from Harvard’s Business School didn’t disagree. “Google now can and does do what the Pirate Bay has always done,” Edelman said.

Rather symbolically, some enterprising user(s) have cobbled together a custom search that proves Google’s role in the broad accessibility of illegal material. Not that you would actually use this search to find anything other than Linux ISOs, right?

G2P Beta

Not only is Google good for finding Torrents, advanced search strings can narrow results to a whole host of files: PDFs, mp3s, JPGs and more. The mojo is in refining the search results to return repositories of files instead of complete webpages. Beta v0.2 of Google-to-Person can slice those results down to songs, albums, software, ebooks, ringtones and prox-ify. Be a good user and check your five-finger discount at the door, eh?

6 Comments:

McBain

21 Apr '09, 9:02 pm
Beta v0.2 Link is broke.
McBain

21 Apr '09, 9:05 pm
aaaaaand I'm retarded. Or you fixed it.
UPSLynx

22 Apr '09, 3:36 am

The patch-wearing lads asserted that The Pirate Bay, like Google, merely indexes illicit content, but does host any of the material itself.

Typo? Or am I crazy? That should read 'does not host', yes?

Feel free to delete this post either way.
Thrax

22 Apr '09, 4:02 am
Fixed.
kryyst

22 Apr '09, 12:46 pm
One thing I find interesting in all of this is that while Torrent sites claim they don't host files, and many of them don't. They claim that google does the same thing they do. But that's not really true.

If you google 'gears of war 2 torrent' for example it's not going to actually link you to a tracker. It links you to websites hosting trackers. So if torrent sites weren't around google wouldn't be able to crawl them and find trackers.

So while TPB can say google is just as guilty that's not exactly true.
Cliff_Forster

22 Apr '09, 3:24 pm
Go back a few years, did Napster host the content? No, they lost, then other sites emerge. In fact, calling your site the Pirate Bay is simply a direct middle finger to the content owners. If the Pirate Bay gets shut down, another challenger will emerge, perhaps with a new technology, a new way of sharing content, all the courts and lawyers in the world can't stop it.

Do I participate in file sharing. No, to be totally honest I don't (I dabbled a little in Napster years ago, RIAA I swear I deleted that content!) Since then, I see the fault in it, its fundamentally wrong, its theft. My step son had a limewire account, and now he wonders why it won't work, hmmmmm..... Perhaps it had something to do with the old man (It was hoggin the bandwidth I use for fraggin)

Anyway, while I think the folks at the Pirate Bay do have a point from a certain legal perspective, but its not like Google is blatantly suggesting that you use its service to pirate content, while the Pirate Bay does not leave much to the imagination. Sometimes its not what you say, but how you say it?

Still what the courts and lawyers need to come to grip with is they will never, ever stop it.

In music specifically, there are allot of well to do executives and promoters that are going to be displaced soon. Honestly, if artists knew what was good for them, they would unionize and rebel against their record companies and Clear Chanel, and market their content on their own. Maybe earn less total revenue, but keep all the profits for themselves. This idea of needing someone else to promote your talents in the age of the internet, its long gone. Promote yourself, keep what you earn.

Change the business model, embrace the internet, embrace some form of fair use content sharing, and for the love of god, stop clinging to your antiquated business model because there will be a lessened need for executives and agents to pillage the talents of the entertainment industry.