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.
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Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?
Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.
I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/saved
@Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!
@Martin
The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/
Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.
Omg a badge!!!
Some tangible reward lmao.
It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.
With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.
This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)
Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.
And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.
First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[
Yes. Please. Fix the comments.
With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.
Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.
The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.
If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.
And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.