For a music lover looking to download their favorite songs online for free, one of the best places to start searching is the same place millions of people search for everything else: Google. With a little bit of convincing, Google will show a clever user where to download all sorts of music files for free with just a single click.

There is, however, a little more work to finding music files available for download than your average search. Do a normal Google search for an artist or the title of a song and you'll be bombarded with the official band webpage, pages selling their CDs, their Wikipedia article, fan pages, news articles…

Which is all well and good for someone who wants to learn more about an artist, but a true music lover is looking to download their songs free to their computer. To him, those information pages are pretty much useless. The good news is that with just a few simple modifications, anyone can use Google to search for their favorite music, which can be easily downloaded for free.

So how exactly does a crafty searcher do to find the music they want? Most songs that are stored online can be found in directories on servers throughout the world. The difference between directories and regular webpages is found in the title of the page and the extension.

An online directory will always begin with the following phrase: index of /folder/subfolder/…

This allows a clever searcher to plug this distinguishing characteristic into Google to target only online directories. This fix is as simple as putting the following into the Google search bar:

intitle:"index.of"

This will tell Google to return only online directories, rather than the usual webpages. Next, the search results should be narrowed down to tell Google that it should only return directories that contain music files. This can be done simply by enclosing the file types desired in parenthesis, for example:

(mp3|mp4)

This will return only folders that contain mp3 or mp4 music files. Next, Google needs to know not to return regular webpages, which have file extensions rather than just folders with music files. So in order to tell Google to completely disregard regular webpages and show online directories, one would simply add a minus sign before the file extensions they don't want to see, for example:

-html -htm -php -asp -cf -js

Now to the part where an enterprising music lover tells Google exactly what he is searching for. Searches can be done by putting in the artist, album, or song that Google should go looking for; only it works much better to separate multiple words in the title with dots rather than spaces. This will help to reduce spam results and hopefully only return the actual song files, for example:

this.song.rocks or my.favorite.album

So with all the pieces, it's time to put it all together. With a song or album in mind, it's just as simple as going to the Google search bar and typing in (or copy and paste for the lazy):

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