Guide: How to Turn Bing into Your Own P2P Search Engine

We’ve all seen many ways to use Google to search for specific files using specific Boolean searches. While using Google may be one of the oldest tricks in the book for P2P related activity, Google is by far not the only search engine that can be transformed into your own personal P2P search engine. We look at two dead simple tricks to turn Bing into a P2P search engine.

Techdirt made an interesting notenot too long ago about how search results on Google were being taken down due to DMCA complaints while Microsoft’s search engine Bing was leaving some pirated results up due to (presumably) fewer complaints. With screen shots to prove the point, we wondered how easy it was to turn Bing into your own BitTorrent or cyberlocker search engine. Turns out, it isn’t that hard to do.

Bing as a Torrent Search Engine

This uses a simple piece of Boolean. All you have to do is type in “filetype:torrent” (without quotations of course), then, add a space and type in whatever torrent you happen to be looking for. For something like games, the terms “crack”, “keygen” and “PC” are great examples to help narrow your search if the title is a little ambiguous. here’s an example of what we’re talking about:

As we can see, Bing is indexing numerous BitTorrent websites. Now, we should point out that nothing is verified on Bing itself, so make sure you have an up to date virus scanner to ensure that what you download is not infected first. Ideally, you should be able to click on the result and scan through the comments to see if what you are downloading is legit, but you may not always get that.

Bing as a Cyber Locker Search Engine

While the Boolean is also simple, searching effectively requires a little more creativity. One method is to use specific cyberlocker domains. For this, we need a nice list of cyberlockers like the one found on Wikipedia.

Now that we have a nice large list of cyberlockers, we can now get to work. This time, we need to start with the search string “domain:[enter domain name here]“. Next, add a space and search for whatever content you are looking for. Here’s an example of a search result:

Again, results haven’t been verified or anything, so make sure you have an up to date virus scanner to make sure when you get is clean.

Final Thoughts

While this can be an effective method for getting some files, it isn’t a be-all end-all method for getting everything you want. If you use something like a private BitTorrent website that specializes in your interest, it’s probably better to stick with that if you have to get something for free. Before you ask, yes, we picked those specific examples in the screen shots because of the inherent, yet humorous irony.

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