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This weekend, I was asked to review a file search engine called General Search. It’s a site where you can search through a few of the biggest file sharing web sites on the Internet.

How Does It Work

It’s pretty much just what it looks like. You head to the site and initiate a search for whatever files you’re looking for. If you need a Windows XP driver for a Sony DSCP110 camera, just type in the camera model and “driver” and hit search. The site brings back results and shows some helpful information such as a short description, file name, size, and hosting site. When you click on the link, you’re taken to the site to download the file. Bandwidth costs money, so most hosts have a (sometimes slower) free version or you can pay for membership to the host site for faster downloading.

General Search lets you pick which file host to search through if you want to narrow it down and if you register for one of their free accounts it will keep track of your past downloads so you don’t have to search again if you lose a file.

Why Would I Use This?

To answer this question, you should first ask why you would need to look through the file hosting sites this site searches. The biggest reason is to find obscure or otherwise hard to find files. A great example is if you wanted to track down an older driver that worked better for you but the manufacturer’s web site only has the latest driver. In such a case one of those file hosting sites might have the older driver and this file sharing search site might help you track down that file. So it’s good to have a site like General Search bookmarked for circumstances like these.

Additionally, it’s sometimes fun to take a look at the top or recent searches and see what people are looking for. You never know if you’ll discover some new song or funny video.

Content Quality

To be quite honest, I’m not as familiar with Uploading.com, but RapidShare seems to attract a lot of porn and pirated files. It seems like they do a pretty good job of removing anything copyrighted or illegal, but don’t be surprised if you see some adult themes in the recent and top searches. I suppose this could be a good thing if you’re looking for that stuff. If not, just type in what you’re looking for and the other spectrum of content shouldn’t get in the way of your search too much.

One of the things that I saw that I was unhappy with was a search result directing me to a site other than one of the actual file sharing sites. This alternate site pretends to try and connect to get your file and then tells you that this particular file needs you to create an account. It’s not illegal and I don’t know if it even tries to get money from you, but it’s a little sneaky and doesn’t seem very nice. I always ignore those and head back to the search results. I don’t know if I’m being directed to that site by General Search or by the file host.

Conclusions

Although I didn’t like the fake download registration option I came across, General Search, itself was fast and yielded some good file results. As a test, I was able to find and download a Samsung camera driver pretty quickly, which beats looking through forums for a while. I’ve bookmarked this site for my future file needs.

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