After the catastrophic decision of a Swedish court to punish the operators of The Pirate Bay at the behest of a number of wealthy conglomerates (click HERE to read more about that), the world of bit torrents just hasn’t been the same. Although The Pirate Bay’s tracker had remained operational, a Stockholm court in October ordered it to be shut down (click HERE to read more about that). Also, the pair of “pirates” were banned from further involvement with the site, even though it has supposedly been sold to another company. Yesterday, however, will forever be remembered in history as the day The Pirate Bay’s tracker was finally shut down (click HERE to read more about that) and the site has changed to rely on a new technology, DHT and PEX that is supposed to help users find torrent without any “computational” involvements with TPB servers. This would obviously add plausibility to TPB’s claim to be uninvolved in the file transfer process. Doubts exist, however, concerning the effectiveness of DHT and PEX, as used to download torrents, so whether these will effect any turnabout in the decline of bit torrent use remains to be seen.

Many users have turned to RapidShare as an alternative to what has become a risky torrent scene, but RapidShare is not without risks either as evidenced by the shutdown of OdSiebie.com by the Polish (Click HERE to read more). Still RapidShare exists primarily as a way to store files on line for legitimate uses, but we should all expect to see government moves against the site in the future as wealthy corporate intersts set their sights upon it.

Still, many resources exist on Rapidshare which can be useful, but RapidShare does not of itself furnish a means to search the files stored on it. While many RapidShare search sites exist, many of them have tawdry ads and may present spyware risks. Google, therefore,  is probably your best bet to try to find something there. I have just a few pointers on how to more effectively use Google to find RapidShare files. Just go to Google.com and punch “site:rapidshare.de” followed by:

* “inurl:pdf” for Ebooks in PDF Format
* “inurl:avi|wmv|mpg|nva” for Movies
* “inurl:mp3|ogg|wma” for Audio Files
* “inurl:exe” for executable application
* “inurl:zip|rar|7zip|tar” for RAR, ZIP, 7ZIP or TAR compressed archieve

Doing this uses search methods available to Google, but are sadly overlooked by many users.For more information on how to search Google better, click HERE.