This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of SellMyMobile.com. All opinions are 100% mine.
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.
I can be pretty picky about the sponsored posts I accept because I want to post about stuff I would actually use or buy myself. Today is no exception, because today’s post is about a product that I think is timely, useful, and reasonably priced. It’s iPod / iPhone to iTunes Transfer software called iPodRobot.
One of the things that I’ve heard people complain about with the iPhone is that you have to sync it with iTunes to get files on and off the device. I’ve personally felt that was annoying with my own iPhone. Almost every other smart phone on the planet lets you connect to it as a mass storage device and access your videos, photos, etc. This software works as a bridge between your computer and the data on your phone, eliminating the need for iTunes as part of the equation. It’s a great idea and I’m a little shocked that I haven’t seen it before.
When the software starts up, it looks for your phone and connects to it. Then you just select the folders or files on your phone to transfer and tell it to move them to your computer. After confirming (or changing) the local folder, the files are moved. There’s not much to it, really. The one thing I was unable to find (and isn’t listed as an option on the site) was uploading files to the phone from my computer. The lack of bi-directional transfer was a drawback to me. Looking at the glass as half full, you can download a free trial to try it out, and what it does do it does well and without needing any specialized knowledge. For $20, it’s a nice piece of software to have if you don’t want to (or can’t) sync with iTunes for some reason.
While I was on the site, I checked out their Free iPod / iPhone Video Converter software. It did what it promised and pretty quickly. I was able to convert an AVI Flip video from one of my previous reviews into an iPhone-friendly format and just like the transfer software, this had a simple interface and just worked fast and clean out of the box. Although the ipodrobot software lacks a valuable feature I was looking for, I gave the company extra points for delivering otherwise very solid, stable, and easy to use products.
About a month or so ago, I decided to jailbreak my iPhone. To be honest, I was a little worried at first about the idea that I might ruin it, but not only did it work the first time trying, but it was incredibly simple. One of the features my new iPhone JB has is the ability to ssh to and from it and I can record video. Unfortunately, my Cycorder (video recording program) doesn’t have a built-in way to get the videos from my phone to anywhere else. My desire to share a humorous video of the cats with my wife now seemed a near impossible act. Sync won’t do it. Email won’t do it. My Flickit app won’t see anything outside my photo album.
Getting from here to there Crossing my fingers, I downloaded the FTP On The Go app from the app store. I needed an FTP application, anyway. Sadly, it is bound to the same constraints as every other iPhone AppStore app, meaning it can’t see files outside its own directory tree. That’s great from a security and privacy standpoint, but it left me still searching for a solution. I wrote the author of the app, who quickly confirmed two things for me: 1. The application can only upload files from within its own file tree and 2. yes, moving files into that tree should do the trick.
Armed with a new game plan, I set out to take back control of my iPhone and the files on it. First, I tried making a symbolic link from the Cycoder Videos folder to the Documents/Files folder FTP On The Go provides. That didn’t work at all. I thought it was because FTP On The Go didn’t recognize the folder, thinking it was just a file. Next, I tried making a symbolic link from the video, itself to the Documents/Files folder. This also didn’t work, and I suspect that it’s because FTP On The Go is not following the symbolic link properly. I’m also guessing that’s part of the iPhone’s security rules. Eventually, I settled for placing the video directly into the target folder, after which it uploaded just fine to my server.
Why go to all the trouble?
I can connect to my iPhone over my wireless network via SSH and SFTP (Secure FTP), pop into the videos directory, and download whatever I want right to my laptop. That being said, some may question the longer method mentioned above. If I was home this morning that would have been the method used and you wouldn’t be reading this. At my office, my computer is wired, so I had no computer connected to the wireless network (it’s a different network). This makes the simple act of connecting directly to the iPhone over my wireless network all that much harder. Additionally, there will be times when I have a video (or some other file) on my iPhone that I need to move to a server, my laptop, etc. while I am not near a computer. When that happens, I’ll need a solution that relies completely on the capabilities that rest in the palm of my hand. It’s better to figure this out now than when that really is all I have to work with and need something fast.
What I’ve learned
First of all, I’ve learned that symbolic links won’t work and I REALLY wish they did. I would much rather link to the video folder (and my SNES ROMS folder) once. Without symbolic links, I have to copy any file I want to FTP every time. I’ve also learned, while poking around in the file system, that there’s a lot of raw files to play with. Perhaps there’s even a hidden setting somewhere to loosen up my symbolic linking. Either way, it’s a lot of fun to dig around and see what other trouble I can find. Just for kicks, the video can be seen below.
