Web Design Ireland

Searching for a file this morning. A particular, old version of a file. It struck me that Google - brilliant as it is, does something rather poorly.

Searching for particular files with wildcards.

Lets say for example, that I am searching for an old version of a commercial product - which I bought at the time, but is no longer available through the developers website. I still have a valid license, but the developer has went belly up, and is no where to be found on the web. I don’t know the exact name of the file but I have a fair idea that it will either be a .zip or a .exe. It may have the words of the publisher in the file name, it may have the product name.

Here are my options.

1). Download it illegally from a file sharing network. Not really an option.
2). Browse for it on some FTP search - and hope I stumble across it
3). Google the company / product name, and again *hope* that I stumble across it. 
4). Try an “old version” version website 
5). Try using filetype:exe *companyname* search on Google - poor poor results - its using the main index for these results.

Here’s what I would like to see , a specific “search for files” options perhaps specifying the file type, and whether it returns both HTTP and FTP servers, and only search for strings within the file name itself - not the surrounding text.

In addition to this, I’ve came up against the problem of not being able to search for HTML strings. What if I wanted to return all the websites that contain a certain string in the body of the HTML? Can’t currently be done. I know I’d like to be able to find all the websites which run Wordpress, or all the sites that run Movable Type, or all the sites created by a certain Author that leaves his name in the HTML every time.

What would you like to see Google do better?