Rapidshare and Megaupload are both very popular sites for downloading content, but may be a bit difficult to navigate, search and download what you are looking for really. Here are four ways to help you move faster and get a better experience.

1. How to find files on Rapidshare / Megaupload

While searching innate content of these sites (eg Megaupload) are notoriously poor, third party search sites do work quite well. FileFab, FunFail, Crawlrapidshare Megauploadbot are useful search engines specializing in digging results from these sites.

2. How to check if the Rapidshare / Megaupload links work

Once you find what you want, the next thing you need is to be cautious about whether the link is still working. Many of these links may be broken or have been retired for one reason or another, but may still appear in search results. The Cavern Links Checker is a free Greasemonkey script that works in Firefox.

What it does is it detects links on a web page content download sites like Rapidshare and Megaupload and color-coded green or red depending on whether they are alive or not.

3. How to skip all the unnecessary pages to download from Rapidshare / Megaupload

Then, once you have determined which link you want to click-through, so as to save you time. Most download sites that force click through pages full of ads and wait for the countdown if you have a premium account. SkipScreen is a powerful Firefox extension with a strong proposal. It allows you to skip unnecessary pages on sites like Rapidshare, Megaupload, zshare, Mediafire, and more.

4. How to control your download speed so you can surf during the download of Rapidshare / Megaupload

Once you are downloading something, there is sometimes a tendency to have a download session to eat all available bandwidth. This is fine if you’re not at your desk, but if you want to use the net at the same time, you may want to consider using jDownloader.

This free desktop tool that allows access to all sorts of advanced features such as downloading in multiple parallel streams, captcha recognition, and best of all, the tops of fast download, so you can go to speed when you’re out, and take it down a notch when you’re using the computer at the same time.