Here is a list of commands I use to find files in Ubuntu.
To find all files with .zip extension You can use this
find . -name "*.zip"
If you want to find all files with a pattern use this
find . -name "*pattern*"
If you want to exclude a directory, for example dir1 from the search use this command
find . -path ./dir1 -prune -false -o -name '*.txt'
If you want to exclude many directories from the search, use this command
find . -type d \( -path dir1 -o -path dir2 -o -path dir3 \) -prune -false -o -name '*.txt'
If you want to only search for files then you should use this command.
find . -type f -name "*.zip"
If you want to ignore letter case use iname instead of name
find . -iname "*pattern*"
How to find the latest files by modified date
find . -type f -exec ls -lt \{\} \+ | head