FilesTube, File Search Engine

FilesTube is a popular meta file search engine that lets you search file hosting sites for hosted files. It supports a variety of file hosts, from Rapidshare and Mediafire over 4Shared and Megaupload to Filesonic and Fileserve. The search engine is extremely popular, with an Alexa metrics rank of 145 at the moment.

When you open the Filestube page for the first time you see lots of links on that page. At the top, you find a small bar with account related features and options to display videos, games, lyrics or software directly in the results listing.

FilesTube's core is the meta search engine that is placed prominently on the homepage of the service. A click on search will search all supported file hosting sites for files of that kind. You can use the filter list to limit the search to specific file extensions, or switch to the advanced search interface to add other filters like file sizes, dates or hosting sites to the search.

The file search result's listings lists the number of results returned for the search query. A sidebar is available to filter or redefine the search. It is for instance possible to only display search results from particular file hosting sites, or sort the files by popularity, date or size instead of relevance.

Results are displayed with detailed information, ranging from the file's name, size and upload date to the file hosting site that it is stored on.

A click on a file opens another page on FilesTube that can be used to click through to the file host that is hosting the download. The page has lots of buttons and other stuff that make it difficulty for inexperienced users to find the right download button.

One interesting feature of FilesTube is the ability to create RSS alerts for file searches. Say you always want to be informed if a new file of that type is uploaded to a file hosting site, or that you have not found what you were looking for and want to be notified if that particular file that you are looking for is uploaded to one of the file hosts. Then RSS feeds are your best option to monitor file hosting sites for uploads with that name.

One of the biggest user complaints regarding FilesTube is the messy look of the site, with ads and sponsored links placed in close proximity of contents.

You can register an account with FilesTubes which is completely free and comes with benefits like a download history or making and managing file lists. The site appears to be fully usable without an account though.

Other Features

If you look hard enough, you find other useful features on the Filestube.com website. Trends is one for instance. It displays the top 320 searches of the actual day, or a specific month. That way you can determine what's hot and what's not in a heartbeat, at least when it comes to file sharing trends.

You obviously find the usual assortment of always of high interest searches related to pornography and celebrities, but also current hot topics which usually are about tv shows, movies and music.

Another, seemingly new service is groups, which can be used by FilesTube account owners to create groups that they want to share with other users. Those are basically compiled and sorted lists of files that users have discovered on file sharing sites.

FilesTube Video

FilesTube.com Search Tools

The following section lists tools, for instance browser extensions or userscripts, that improve the experience on FilesTube.

• Filestube.com Cleanup [userscript] - Removes all advertisement and sponsored links from the Filestube.com website.
• FilesTube.Clean Redux [userscript] - Removes all page elements, including ads and sponsored links, that most users do not want to see on the Filestube website.
• The Cavern Links Checker [userscript] - Checks for working links on file hosting sites before you visit the file host site itself.
• FilesTube [Firefox Add-on] - Adds FilesTube as a search engine provider to the list of Firefox search engines, so that you can search directly from the Firefox interface.
• JDownloader [all operating systems] - Universal file downloader that makes the downloading of files from file hosting sites more comfortable.

Closing Words

FilesTube has a surprisingly high rating at web reputation services like Web of Trust. It ranks as excellent for trusthworthiness, reliability and privacy there, only Child Safety is rated as unsatisfactory which can be attributed to the semi-direct access to porn on the site.

The service has been recently in the news as Yahoo began to block FilesTube links in Yahoo Messenger.

Advertisement