filing cabinets Quick name a search engine! If you're like most people, you probably said, "Google!" And that's not unreasonable. The people at Google have built a humongous company based on the idea of being extremely good at connecting you to the resources you need online. Okay, well, the company's really based on the ads they can show you while they're delivering you these great search results, but if they weren't good at the searching part, no one would show up to use them, no ads, and all those people have to go back to... well, whatever they were doing before they signed up with Google.

That said, Google is not the only game in town. Microsoft has doggedly remained in the search business with a series of offerings, the latest being Bing (which some suggest really stands for "Bing Is Not Google"). But there are also specific search engines for different types of searches, and it's in this category we find an interesting option called "Find That File". They sent this message to try to get the word out:

We are reaching out to inform educators, librarians, professors and students of our emerging technology — a public search engine that can best be used to search for media and documents, making it ideal for research and other educational purposes: http://www.findthatfile.com

So sure, I went to check them out. And while they won't help you find web pages, they really do seem to be pretty good at finding actual files. This includes Word and PDF documents, spreadsheets, presentations, MP3 files, videos, anything that's a separate file from an ordinary web page. And it's no accident they mention education, as there are a number of good educational uses for a search engine that only looks for files. If you want to make your term paper look a little more exciting, it can help you find cool fonts. If there's an article you need to read for that research project, and it's not available through your school's online library, you can see whether there's a copy of it somewhere else on the web. If there's a concept you don't fully understand, and there's no video lecture in your course, you can find out whether there's a lecture on that subject somewhere else that might help you.

With these sorts of searches, the question of copyright always comes up. Is it possible to find material that's copyrighted, where the person making it available is infringing on that copyright? Probably, especially since the site looks for BitTorrent resources, and those are often (but not always) associated with copies of music, movies, television shows, and books that are not online with the distributor's approval. But it's up to the searcher whether to be interested in those sorts of resources, and one thing is for certain — there are innumerable good uses for this sort of search that have nothing to do with the seamier side of the web.

So if you find yourself in need of a good search for a document or sound or video file, you may want to give Find That File a try. After all, it's never a bad idea to have as many tools in your toolbox as possible!