Skip to main content

How to Find Public Google Drive Folders

Generally, when you try to open a web directory in your browser, the browser will either return you an “index” page – an HTML page (or PHP or ASP etc.) that’s in the root of the directory, or if the index file is absent, it will deny access to the directory. But if the index file is missing and the webmaster forgot to password protect the folder, the server will return a listing of the files that are within the directory. An unprotected web directory is like a publicly accessible open computer. You can navigate within the folders, view files or even download them. Many webmasters routinely forget to configure their webservers to deny directory access, thereby exposing their content on the internet for anybody to see.

Google Drive too allows creation of public folders. The idea is to let people share content with others without having to send invitation or requiring them to login to their respective Google accounts. If you use Google Drive, you must already know this. What you might not have been aware is that these public folders are searchable on the web.That’s right. All those open content have been crawled by Google’s spiders and neatly indexed in a file somewhere on their servers.

To find a public Google Drive folder, copy and paste the following query into the Google’s search field:

site:https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=

gdrive-public-folders

You can combine the “site” parameter with other queries. For instance,

mp3 site:https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=

will show you all public Google Drive folders with MP3 files. Replace “MP3” with “MP4” or “AVI” and you’ll find folders containing videos. You can also search for “books” or “PDF” or “DOC”.

How to prevent exposing your public Google Drive folder?

Simple. Don’t keep a public folder. If you had created a public folder in the past and if its purpose has been served, lock down the folder or delete it. If you can’t delete a public Google Drive folder, go through its content to check whether you placed something there accidentally.

You can also change how others access your public folders. To do that, follow these steps.

1. Open your Google Drive account and look for the “user icon” in the folders. That icon indicates public folder.

gdrive-permission-1

2. Select the folder, and click on the link icon in the toolbar.

gdrive-permission-2

3. Click on Sharing settings

gdrive-permission-3

4. Click on Advanced

gdrive-permission-4

5. Here you can see who has access to the folder. Click on Change.

gdrive-permission-5

6. Set it to “Off – Specific people”. Then Save it.

gdrive-permission-6

7. Now your folder can be viewed by only those people who you share it with.

gdrive-permission-7

Comments

  1. Most people find it hard to find these folders, thanks for the post.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to Record CPU and Memory Usage Over Time in Windows?

Whenever the computer is lagging or some application is taking too long to respond, we usually fire up task manager and look under the Performance tab or under Processes to check on processor utilization or the amount of free memory available. The task manager is ideal for real-time analysis of CPU and memory utilization. It even displays a short history of CPU utilization in the form of a graph. You get a small time-window, about 30 seconds or so, depending on how large the viewing area is.

How to Schedule Changes to Your Facebook Page Cover Photo

Facebook’s current layout, the so called Timeline, features a prominent, large cover photo that some people are using in a lot of different creative ways. Timeline is also available for Facebook Pages that people can use to promote their website or business or event. Although you can change the cover photo as often as you like, it’s meant to be static – something which you design and leave it for at least a few weeks or months like a redesigned website. However, there are times when you may want to change the cover photo frequently and periodically to match event dates or some special promotion that you are running or plan to run. So, here is how you can do that.

Diagram 101: Different Types of Diagrams and When To Use Them

Diagrams are a great way to visualize information and convey meaning. The problem is that there’s too many different types of diagrams, so it can be hard to know which ones you should use in any given situation. To help you out, we’ve created this diagram that lays out the 7 most common types of diagrams and when they’re best used: