Here's one of those should exist problems.

Start a search for your favourite band. Specify .Mp3 only. Get the results as an RSS feed. Use your podcaster to collect the feed and treat every entry as an enclosure to be downloaded. Voila! One week later you're well on the way to building your own local archive of every instance on the web. Now instead of music and mp3, try .torrent of videos of your favourite TV show.

There's clearly a lot of problems with handling duplication and managing disk space. But right now, with MSN doing RSS output and Yahoo already doing it, the potential is there. The next problem is that I had a look at the advanced search settings in Google, MSN and Yahoo. In all of them, file format is a drop down list with only a few entries although you can use command line style parameters so a search for Alias (the TV show) torrents http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=alias+filetype%3Atorrent does appear to work.

What's interesting is that some of these searches produce almost no results. So http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=def+jam+filetype%3Amp3 has a single result from Japan. Which makes me wonder. Does Google really not index Mp3s or the ID tags inside Mp3s? Or is it really the case that there's only a single Def Jam .mp3 or audio/mpeg on the web?


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[ 15-Jan-05 9:01am ] [ , ]