Looking For A Job?

  1. Start InfoFinder on a webpage that links to a number of different employers or companies.
  2. Then let it run.
  3. It will go to all of the linked webpages and pull off all of the e-mail addresses on each of the webpages.
  4. You can find all of these e-mail addresses in a file in InfoFinder's logging directory called "emailAddresses.txt".

Looking For A Bunch Of Images, Videos, MP3's Or Any Other Type Of Media

On many websites you have to deal with pop-up windows and advertisements. With InfoFinder, you can:
  1. Start InfoFinder on a webpage that links (either directly or indirectly through intermediate webpages) to the images or media of interest.
  2. Refine InfoFinder's search by entering appropriate search criteria for your media (images, video, audio, documents, misc) of interest.
  3. It will go to all of the linked webpages and pull off all of the media that matches your search criteria.
Here are two websites that I'm a big fan of:
The comics "Get Fuzzy" and "Dilbert". They both have websites online with a calender of comics... the only downside is that you have to click on each day to bring up the comic, wait for the page to load (as well as advertisements) and then right click on the comic to save it to disk. Well, here is how you can snag a month of Dilbert just by running and setting up my program:
in Search->WebPages->URL name
www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/
in Search->Images-> file name
dilbert
in Location box:
http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/
don't forget to click on Download->Images - otherwise you the tool won't download any images

Here is how you can grab a month of "Get Fuzzy":
in Search->WebPages->URL name
www.dilbert.com/comics/getfuzzy/archive/
in Search->Images-> file name
getfuzzy
in Location box:
http://www.dilbert.com/comics/getfuzzy/index.html
don't forget to click on Download->Images - otherwise you the tool won't download any images

Do You Want To Grab An Entire Website (Or Part Of It) And Run It On Your Own Machine?

  1. Start InfoFinder on a webpage that links (either directly or indirectly through intermediate webpages) to all of the webpages on the website of interest
  2. Refine InfoFinder's search by entering appropriate search criteria for your website. The most useful search criteria you can set if you want to grab an entire website, is to tell InfoFinder not to travel to any site except your site of interest (click here to find out how).
  3. It will go to all of the linked webpages and pull off all of the media that matches your search criteria.

Looking For A File On The Web That Exactly Matches A File That You Have?

Have you met someone online and their picture looks a little too good to be true. Or have you had an embaressing picture taken and suspect someone has put that image on the web. Or perhaps you just want to track down a website that distributes the mp3 you already have. You can use this feature in InfoFinder to track down copies of files that you already possess.
  1. Start InfoFinder on a webpage that links (either directly or indirectly through intermediate webpages) to the website that you think might have your file.
  2. Use the Search File Match feature to select your file of interest.
  3. It will go to all of the linked webpages and pull off all of the media that matches your file or at least the number of bytes of your file that you specified.

Refine InfoFinder's Search

There are many ways to refine InfoFinder's search criteria.
  1. File Size: One way to refine the search is to set the size of files that you are interested in. For instance, often you will visit a webpage and not want any of the advertising images (sometimes called banners). Luckily these images tend to be smaller (usually under 20 kilobytes or 20480 bytes). Therefore, to set a minimum image file size, go to:
    Search->Images
    and set the Minimum File Size to 20480.
  2. Web Site: Another way to refine the search is to tell InfoFinder if you would like to stay only on the current website
  3. Media URL: For example with images - If you want to ensure you only get your images from a particular host (like www.msn.com), you can specify the hostname that you want all images to be taken from by going to:
    1. Search->Images
    2. and then filling in the text field called "Image URL Search String"
  4. Media Filename: For example with audio files - If you want to ensure you only get mp3's with the word "Prince" in them then you can go to:
    1. Search->Audio
    2. and then filling in the text field called "Audio Filename Search String"
  5. Search Heuristics:Work in progress. This is a currently offered feature, but it is very limited, so not worth your time setting. Basically, the search heuristics offer a way for a potentially more accurate and faster search.

What are Indirect Links?

An Indirect Link is when you must travel through 1 or more other webpages to get to the destination webpage.
For instance, lets say that website "A" links to a website "B" and website "B" links to website "C". This means that website "A" is indirectly linked to website "C".

Search File Match

If you have a file on your local disk drive and would like to attempt to match that file with a file that InfoFinder comes across, then here is how you go about it:
  1. Set InfoFinder's starting location to a website that you suspect is linked to a copy of the file in question.
  2. Go to:
    Search->File Match
    Then enter:
    1. The file name of the file on your local disk drive
    2. The number of bytes you want to match against (note: the bytes that will be compared will always start at the beginning of the file).
    3. And Optionally:
      1. The Media (images, video, audio, etc) you want to InfoFinder to compare it with
      2. The file extensions within that particular type of media

Stay On Starting Location's Website

If you want InfoFinder to stay on the website you start it on, go to:
Search->Web Pages
and then enter your starting website's host name in the text field called "Web Page URL Search String".

For example, let's say that you execute a search on:
www.google.com
and then press the search button that is displayed in your web browser. This will cause a different URL to appear in your web browser (for example: http://www.google.ca/search?q=%22tim+cassidy%22&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&meta=).
You can then take that new URL and put it into InfoFinder (copy the text and paste it into the location text field of InfoFinder). Then click on: Search->Web Pages
and then enter google in the text field called "Web Page URL Search String".

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