Finding Flash Files and Games with Google, MSN Search, and Yahoo

Contributed by AlexTheBeast July 16, 2005  
Tagged: Internet

Quick tutorial on using the major search engines to find flash files.

A girl in my office is addicted to flash files. She was looking for a particular flash file the other day but couldn’t find it on the internet. She asked me how to search for flash files and only flash files.

Google:

Use the filetype command with google to search for flash files. Here’s me looking for street fighter in flash format:

[list]Google: filetype:swf “street fighter”

Using our previous google tricks looking for open directories, you can also search for open directories that contain flash files like this:

Google: -inurl:htm -inurl:html intitle:”index of” “Last modified” swf

Yahoo:

Yahoo has the ability to do similiar searches with the originurlextension command. Here I search for clones of the famous game breakout:

[list]Yahoo: originurlextension:swf breakout

MSN Search:

Boo for MSN search as it supports a filetype command, but it doesn’t work with flashfiles. For example, this will return nothing:

[list]MSN Search: filetype:swf

Using the contains command works better and is pretty effective. Here I use MSN Search to find flash asteroid games:

MSN Search: contains:swf asteroids

However, you can still use our searching for open directories tricks to find indexes filled with flash files:

MSN Search: intitle:”index of” -inurl:.htm -inurl:.html contains:swf “last modified”

Please post and comments or questions in the comment section below.