First Mega search engine online, won’t be the last

Mega, the new Megaupload file hosting site, has received a lot of attention from the press in the recent year ever since Megaupload was taken down by the authorities. At its core, it is a file hosting site like many others with the main difference that files get encrypted and decrypted on the local system so that Mega does not know what is hosted on its servers.

Most file hosting sites do not offer file search capabilities that let users search all publicly shared files on their servers, and even if Mega wanted, it could not offer that feature because of the encryption. This leaves third party sites for that and one of the first has just been been released.

Mega Search displays a list of files right on its start page. Each file is listed with its name, size, hits, ratio, date it has been added to the search engine’s database and up and down votes. The database seems to contain more than 7800 files right now which is not a lot considering that search engines for other file hosting sites offer hundreds of thousands of links to files hosted on these sites.

Still, for a relatively new service it is definitely a large enough number. When you look at the files offered on the start page, you will notice that many seem to be of questionable origin. From popular TV show episodes to music and applications, it is all listed here. Category listings on the left allow you to filter results by type. This includes videos, music, applications or disk images.

A click on a file opens the Mega website from where the file can be downloaded to the local system or imported into another Mega account.

The search engine furthermore offers capabilities to add links to it and to report infringement. If you’d go by that, a lot of files would probably have to be taken down immediately.

How long will the search engine be up? That depends on a number of factors, including the country it is hosted in and the legal system of that country. Some file search engines have been online for a long time and since they only link to contents but do not host any directly, it is possible that there are no legal grounds to get the site removed from the Internet.

It could be more problematic for Mega on the other hand as it could provide rights owners with evidence that the site is being used to trade copyrighted files.

The post First Mega search engine online, won’t be the last appeared first on gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials.

via Jonathan's starred items in Google Reader