The new search engine Crawl Rapidshare (via Technospot) tries to raise the bar by providing real time search results that are automatically checked by a script to inform the user if a link is not working anymore. It still makes use of search engines to populate the search results but it does add the real time results and the file checking as added services that makes the Rapidshare service more usable than most other websites that offer a similar one.

The option to check the links has to be enabled by checking the Check Links Validity box beneath the search form. It will slow down the search because every link will be checked first and then listed on the page. The file size of working links will also be displayed next to the name of the file which is another useful information.

This ensures that most pages with invalid files will be removed from your search results.

Update: This may require some explanation after all. When you run searches on sites such as Google or Bing, you can make use of advanced parameters that further define what you are looking for. The minus sign parameter at the top avoids results that have the words forbidden, inactivity, found or deleted on the page.

The reason for excluding those words is simple: You do not want results displayed in Google that are pointing to invalid downloads. And downloads that are no longer working are usually highlighted with those words, e.g. the file has been deleted.

You can use the same principle for other file hosting sites, or to further refine your Rapidshare searches.

Please note that Google has recently begun to block Rapidshare and other file hosting site results from its search engine. If you run a search like site:rapidshare.com linux on Google you are presented with no file results at all, only a few core pages of the service that are not used for hosting at all.

If you run the same query on Bing, you will notice that Microsoft’s search engine offers more results. It is still a low amount of results though. Most search engines censor or filter out search results for file hosting sites nowadays.

You may need to use specialized search engines and file databases instead to find files on Rapidshare. Just search for “Rapidshare search engine” or “Rapidshare files” to find those sites. They come and go fairly quickly usual, and it makes no sense to link to a service from here that may not be there anymore tomorrow.