How to find almost anything you want with open directories

What is an open directory and why are they useful? Open directories are simple file directories on the Internet that are not password protected and can contain any type of file. They include Movies, TV shows, Music, Comic Books, or ebooks.

How do open directories get to be on the Internet? They come into existence in many ways but some include, misconfiguration of apache or network attached storage (NAS), or perhaps someone just wants to share what they have.

The sky is the limit for what you can find but how do you find open directories? Google has faithfully indexed them for us to find. We only need to search for them. So, lets take a look at some of the searches and how to properly search for them. Here is an example of a search for a movie:

Name of Movie +(.mkv|.mp4|.avi|.mov|.mpg|.wmv) intitle:"index of" -inurl:(jsp|pl|php|html|aspx|htm|cf|shtml) -inurl:(listen77|mp3raid|mp3toss|mp3drug|index_of|wallywashis)

First change "Name of Movie" to the video you are searching for. The plus symbol means that has to be in the search result. If it is not in the search result then Google will not display it. Everything inside the parenthesis and divided by the pipe symbol are treated as OR. So, the first part is searching for any of those file extensions and the search result must include at least one of them. The next bit is searching for "index of" in the title. Apache will always list "index of" in the title of directory listings. The -inurl: means don't include any result that has the following in the URL. This line is there to remove results that are supposed to look like index listings but actually aren't.

So, what if you are looking for something else? Just change the "Name of Movie" to the thing you are looking for and the file extensions to match the file type. Here are a couple more examples:

Search for music
Name of Song +(.ogg|.mp3|.flac|.wma|.m4a) intitle:"index of" -inurl:(jsp|pl|php|html|aspx|htm|cf|shtml) -inurl:(listen77|mp3raid|mp3toss|mp3drug|index_of|wallywashis)

Search for ebooks (this includes comic books)
Name of Book +(.MOBI|.CBZ|.CBR|.CBC|.CHM|.EPUB|.FB2|.LIT|.LRF|.ODT|.PDF|.PRC|.PDB|.PML|.RB|.RTF|.TCR) intitle:"index of" -inurl:(jsp|pl|php|html|aspx|htm|cf|shtml) -inurl:(listen77|mp3raid|mp3toss|mp3drug|index_of|wallywashis)

Search for Images
Name of Image +(.jpg|.gif|.png|.tif|.tiff|.psd) intitle:"index of" -inurl:(jsp|pl|php|html|aspx|htm|cf|shtml) -inurl:(listen77|mp3raid|mp3toss|mp3drug|index_of|wallywashis)

This search will only work with index listings that follow apache's example and may not include results that are legitimate but will also cut down on false positives. For Music:

Name of Album +(.ogg|.mp3|.flac|.wma|.m4a) -inurl:(htm|html|php|listen77|mp3raid|mp3toss|mp3drug|index_of|wallywashis|jsp|pl|aspx|cf|shtml) intitle:”index of” +”last modified” +”parent directory” +description +size

Now that you know how to search Google for open directories, here are a couple of sites that do a lot of the work for you:

http://www.filechef.com/
http://palined.com/search/

Feel free to respond in the comments with the searches that you use or anything need correction or clarification.