15 ms·

Dorking: the use of search engines to find very specific data

• voldacar 6y ago
  Why doesn't google.com have a comprehensive list of these? I'm constantly seeing new ones that I didn't know about, but google never teaches you about them so you have to find them in obscure blog posts
  • KorfmannArno 6y ago
    My guess would be because Google eventually wants users to find everything via natural language queries.
    • lizardmancan 6y ago
      the goal is to make you look at advertisement
    • dragonwriter 6y ago
      Actually, Google eventually wants users to find everything with predictive AI giving it to them before they search. That's not really a secret, they've announced more than once in the past that that is what they are increasingly working toward.
      • souprock 6y ago
        That would be great for malware researchers. Google can give them malware before they even search for it! The reality is that all sorts of things are blocked now, including things that are perfectly legal.
      • mcswell 6y ago
        Reminds me of a story I once read about feeding to an optimizing compiler a program to print out the digits of pi.
  • vezycash 6y ago
    Google randomly ignores "search term in quotes". Related:examplesite.com used to work well. Now, it's better to use sites like alternativeto.net. ~phrase is unnecessary because but google searches for synonyms by default phrase1 + phrase2 - Google randomly ignores it. I use it this way +compulsoryTerm Although rare, there are things I simply can't find using Google. But Bing would. If Google keeps it up, other search engines would benefit.
    • ewired 6y ago
      Doing some "related:" queries returns some interesting results that look human-curated and out-of-date. related:google.com shows results for Yahoo, Bing, AOL Search, and HotBot (which used to be a search engine, but the brand is now for a VPN provider).
      • chris_f 6y ago
        That is great! It's like a search engine blast from the past. Also interesting, related:bing.com gives me no results.
    • EE84M3i 6y ago
      I would be interested to see an example of it ignoring quotes silently because I've heard a lot about it. I use search terms in quotes relatively often and have never noticed that, although it does the 'did you mean without quotes' thing all the time. In the past for very long tail content, I've found Bing and Yandex to be useful. Yandex image search in particular is often better than Google or Bing, particularly if you are searching for people because it does some facial recognition.
    • stanislavb 6y ago
      Ah, I never knew "related:" existed. Also, saashub.com could be used as an alternative to alternativeto.net :)
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • mrnuclear 6y ago
    At least now we are somewhat more empowered to find obscure blog posts. Which raises the suggestion that hackers are advantaged towards finding information. Which raises the suggestion that we should take the independent initiative of using SEO to inform more people about how to become search super-users.
    • abarrettwilsdon 6y ago
      Yea, almost all existing Dorking content is around either SEO or offensive/defensive security scanning. The broader OSINT has used dorking for a decade plus (e.g. exploit-db.com goes back to 2003). The goal in writing this was to democratize access beyond those who use it regularly for work
  • abraae 6y ago
    Having a reliable search syntax would commoditise Google as other search engines could offer the same options. Having just a search box, instead of lots of options was how they moved ahead of e.g altavista in the first place. Google would rather people are trained to just type human speak into the search box.
    • chii 6y ago
      > would commoditise Google as other search engines could offer the same options i highly doubt that's a concern. Google's competitive advantage will not be eroded if they did have operators clearly documented. Another search engine could not replicate google's index, even if they could replicate the operators. And most people do want to just type human speak and have the machine magically interpret it correctly.
  • lstamour 6y ago
    https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en but it's not complete. My favourite is actually the "range" operator. I don't need it often, but when combined with the exact match quotation marks, it's great. For example, here's a search for Sony bluetooth headphones available on Amazon.ca for between CA$100 and $150: https://www.google.com/search?rls=en&q=site%3Aamazon.ca+%22CDN%24+100..150%22+%22bluetooth%22+intitle%3Aheadphones+intitle%3Asony+%22In+Stock%22+%22Add+to+Cart%22 https://www.google.com/search?rls=en&q=site%3Aamazon.ca+%22C... The range operator also works great with years, dates, though the Tools menu with shortcuts for before: and after: operators can help there too. One I haven't seen mentioned yet but used to be documented is that you can leave out words in a phrase by replacing them with an asterisk. I'm having trouble not italicizing text in this comment box, so pretend \* means a single asterisk: "Stocks rose today by \* percent" as a search matches the phrase "stocks rose today, led by a 4.4 percent". (Which until this post, had only one result on Google.) Note that it's not 100% exact matching, because for actually exact matches you have to select "Verbatim" under Tools > All Results in the menu below the search box on the results page. The only downside to using all these operators is that you'll get very familiar and frustrated with the Google reCAPTCHA prompts as your search is "too precise to be human". Even when signed in to Google, especially often in Safari on an iPhone. Sigh.
    • BeeOnRope 6y ago
      You can use three asterisks in a row, surrounded by whitespace, to get a single asterisk like: "Stocks rose today by * percent". Oddly, this results in a non-italicized asterisk in the output, contrary to reports in earlier comments that the resulting asterisk would be in italics. There is, however, a zero-length italicized string right before the asterisk in the HTML: "Stocks rose today by <i></i>* percent".
      • JadeNB 6y ago
        > Oddly, this results in a non-italicized asterisk in the output, contrary to reports in earlier comments that the resulting asterisk would be in italics. There is, however, a zero-length italicized string right before the asterisk in the HTML: > "Stocks rose today by <i></i>* percent". Sounds like the matching is something like /\<\*.*\*/ or maybe /\<\*[^*]*\*/ rather than /\<\*.+*/
  • beefield 6y ago
    > Why doesn't google.com have a comprehensive list of these? It is quite obvious that google does not give a s&it whether I find what I think I want to find. Google is much more interested in 1) serving me ads they think are most profitable and 2) giving me results they think I want.
    • mcswell 6y ago
      I'm pretty sure your (1) is correct. I think your (2) should be giving you results they think you should want, as in you shouldn't want to search for a conspiracy theory (even if your goal is to see what the other side is thinking).
  • EE84M3i 6y ago
    One reason they might not have a comprehensive list is because some might be relatively expensive to execute, but they can't/won't disable them for legacy reasons.
    • JadeNB 6y ago
      > One reason they might not have a comprehensive list is because some might be relatively expensive to execute, but they can't/won't disable them for legacy reasons. Ah, Google, always so reluctant to get rid of anything legacy because of their fanatical devotion to their existing user base.
• the_jeremy 6y ago
  All I want is the ability to search for symbols. Symbolhound.com is the only site I've heard that will support that, but it leaves a lot to be desired.
  • Brakenshire 6y ago
    It’s strange to me that more domain-specific search engines haven’t been created. There must be value in a programmer-specific search engine for instance. Or why aren’t there search engines that specialise in news, social media, Q&A websites or events, to give a few examples.
  • mcswell 6y ago
    Wow, I hadn't heard of that. I need that kind of search a couple times a week. It may leave a lot to be desired, but it's like democracy: the worst possible thing of its class, except for all the rest.
• marcrosoft 6y ago
  I love the “inject JS into the page to find stuff” hack. The author mentions local “site you are on” but this can be applied with headless chrome to crawl many sites.
  • flywheel 6y ago
    That's web scraping 101
• lizardmancan 6y ago
  https://www.google.nl/search?q=site%3A+news.ycombinator.com+lizardmancan https://www.google.nl/search?q=site%3A+news.ycombinator.com+... i use to use these a lot but now it's just useless
  • abarrettwilsdon 6y ago
    Try wrapping lizardmancan in quotation marks - "lizardmancan". That narrows it down to 10 results for me (also: you'll want to remove the space between site: and news.ycombinator.com)
  • mikequinlan 6y ago
    You need to remove the blank after the colon. https://www.google.nl/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+lizardmancan https://www.google.nl/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+l...
• weisbaum 6y ago
  This is a pretty common practice among SEOs for a variety of different reasons. They are also known as advanced search operators. Ahrefs has a pretty comprehensive list here: https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators/ https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators/
• surround 6y ago
  Exploit database with more dorks https://www.exploit-db.com/google-hacking-database https://www.exploit-db.com/google-hacking-database
• sawaruna 6y ago
  Might be my librarian career bias but I'm always surprised at how few people know about query operators. Ironically as Google search seems to be ignoring vital parts of people's queries, they are becoming more needed now, whereas years ago I would have assumed a constantly improving Google search would get better at determining what I was looking for.
  • kebman 6y ago
    You don't even wanna know how many times specialized searches have saved my ass, after multiple years on uni, and working as a writer, journalist, programmer, en even a musician! You can safely say that my entire life revolves around being good at doing various forms of searches.
    • sawaruna 6y ago
      No doubt. Enjoying & (feeling like compared to others I was) excelling at finding information was what made me get interested in information science in the first place, but I often felt advances in ML and NLP would allow for anyone to find exactly what they wanted (which would be great) even considering the increasing amount of information to have to search through. Google’s ‘I’m going to ignore half the words in your search query’ seem to be moving away from that for whatever reason.
    • Wistar 6y ago
      I have long believed that the art of precision search should be taught at the primary level. It is a necessary skill.
      • otr 6y ago
        That idea is present in the Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge. Basically search engines and the use of discussion forums to find information becomes a subject in schools etc. Though this is not the main point of the novel at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End
  • colordrops 6y ago
• neilduncan 6y ago
  I live two towns over from Dorking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorking
  • tutfbhuf 6y ago
    This is reddit humor, that I sometimes miss here. Thx neilduncan.
  • aidos 6y ago
    Also weird for me to see the name here (I’m in the next village over), not one you see popping up often. I occasionally wonder how many other HNers there are scattered about in my local area (I suspect not many).
  • zeristor 6y ago
    Didn’t it feature in “War of the Worlds”? My Dad worked for Mullard, which was renamed to Philips Electronics and relocated to Dorking.
    • ColinHayhurst 6y ago
      Roots in the UK rocket industry that never was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mullard_Space_Science_Laboratory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mullard_Space_Science_Laborato... Another local here; 20 years in Horsham now Haywards Heath
  • chrisb 6y ago
    I live just a few miles to the North. Nice to see a few other ~Dorking locals here :)
    • julian_t 6y ago
      Slightly more than a few miles, but still pretty local (KT4)!
  • tomalpha 6y ago
    I grew up in Dorking, but this is the first time (that I can remember...) that I actually read its wikipedia article. TIL: No one knows why 'Dorking' is called 'Dorking', but there's a English Place Names Society which since the 1920's has researched the origins of town names in England, and is considered [0] to be "the established national body on the subject". [0] https://epns.nottingham.ac.uk/ https://epns.nottingham.ac.uk/
• bmay 6y ago
  the "link:" operator doesn't work for me--it just seems to include the URL's tokens in the search
  • snowwrestler 6y ago
    Pretty sure that one is deprecated. It was very useful for SEO research, which is probably why it doesn’t work anymore.
  • abarrettwilsdon 6y ago
    Hmm, I'm seeing the same now. You can more or less replicate the functionality with intext:specific.url/subsite Will update and credit you.
• yourad_io 6y ago
  Fun fact: googling for -273.15 without double quotes produces no results. You need to quote negative arithmetic values when searching, even if there are no other query parameters. It made me wonder if I was misremembering absolute zero.
  • yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
    Oh, probably because it interprets it as a logical negation; not "negative X", but "remove X from results".
• uniqueid 6y ago
  Last week I blocked every * .google.* domain on my network except "youtube-ui.l.google.com". Google Search: (1) ask a natural language question (since actual search is hobbled) (2) get unrelated garbage and ads back (3) blame yourself for "not being technical enough" to understand why the results aren't actually garbage. Google Search has deteriorated to the point that so far I haven't missed it at all.
  • MattGaiser 6y ago
    What is it you are searching for that the results are useless?
    • fortyseven 6y ago
      Indeed. This seems like a bit overreacting. Google is lots of things, but a shitty search engine to the point of deserving being blocked is not one of them.
      • uniqueid 6y ago
        > a shitty search engine to the point of > deserving being blocked is not one of them. Google's search quality isn't why I blocked Google. I've wanted to block Google for over half a decade, but the excellence of their search stopped me. That stopped being an issue this year.
    • neop1x 6y ago
      For example a specific error string which is definitely in a github repo - it won't find it. I was trying to find why the error is printed. In the past, I used google to even find codes related to my interest (so I additionally specified language keywords like "void" "define" "float") - not working anymore. Fortunately github search works for that but it's slow. In the past, Google ignored "c++", amusingly now it doesn't ignore it but it has much much smaller index, it seems. Google is now useful only for "programming" queries like: why is c++ popular. And most results are then Quora / Stack Overflow / YouTube. Google is sadly a tool for masses and their simple queries about restaurants, actors, etc now. :(
• chris_f 6y ago
  A few corrections: The + (formerly used to force a term to be present in the result) and ~ (also find synonyms) operators have been deprecated. Google now advises to wrap the word in quotes instead of using the +. Google will also automatically look for synonyms without the use of ~. I have seen 'AROUND(n)' mentioned in many other places working as a proximity operator in Google, but I don't believe that is true and haven't found it to work in any logical way. Also the use of parentheses to nest queries is not necessary in Google. It is actually required for Bing on complicated queries though.
  • mehrdadn 6y ago
    The plus operator in the page appears to be binary rather than unary. I've never used it. Is that affected as well? (Though I'm confused why AND is necessary. Isn't it implied normally?)
    • chris_f 6y ago
      That is correct. AND is added by default and is never necessary in Google. It's a little confusing because fo how Google implemented some of the operators. The boolean + operator in many cases is used in the same way as AND, but Google originally used it to let users to force a specific word to be present in a search result. So a search for Fish +Chips was a search for both words, but 'Chips' MUST be present. The equivalent search today is Fish "Chips". It's a little annoying because it requires typing another character, and it it is still not always respected.
      • mcswell 6y ago
        I think the default is more like AND/OR. If AND were the default, and I put a list of five words in without any 'AND' or 'OR', then I'd expect to get only pages that have all 5 of those words. Now of course google looks for synonyms, unless you put quotes around each search term (which ostensibly blocks synonyms, although as you and others mention, this doesn't always work). But afaict, returned pages don't even necessarily have synonyms for all five search terms. That's especially true for words that don't have much semantic content, but it seems to be true even for very specific words. And that's more like OR.
• chc 6y ago
  I'm kind of surprised to see Google brought back the + operator. I remember they prominently changed its meaning when they made it the @ of Google+, and I never bothered to check again after it died.
• jhbadger 6y ago
  Does filetype: still work? I'm getting zero hits for example filetype:epub
  • choo-t 6y ago
    It still work but some file type never return anything, I have the same problem with epub, pretty sure it's some google's shenanigan about books piracy. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35287?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35287?hl=en
    • achairapart 6y ago
      Maybe Google doesn’t index epub at all? I think I never saw one in search results.
      • choo-t 6y ago
        Well, I may have become crazy but i have vivid memory using it in the past, and some websites even refer to this specific query ( https://ebookfriendly.com/google-search-tips-books/ https://ebookfriendly.com/google-search-tips-books/ )
    • gwern 6y ago
      That explains why essentially no DejaVu files show up. I was shocked to test out a .djvu search and find almost nothing.
  • FrankSansC 6y ago
    For some file extensions yes, for others no or not anymore (eg .js)
• yuvadam 6y ago
  Dorking is not that easy to do, Google is very easy on assuming you are being malicious on certain queries, try one too many and you'll hit their dreaded captcha that is impossible to pass.
  • userbinator 6y ago
    That really angers me, and I've tripped it more times than I can count, usually by searching for very specific things. Coworkers have also run into it multiple times (before everyone started working from home, we would exclaim "Fuck you, Google!" and raise a middle finger to the screen, which was a cue to everyone else to help). The fact that they think you're "not human" when you use a search engine for its intended purpose and show how much you know how to use it is both disturbing and saddening. I wonder if Google's own employees run into it and/or the continuing degradation of results, or if they're somehow given immunity and a much better set of results...
    • IggleSniggle 6y ago
      I’m curious about this. Can you give an example of the kind of query you are talking about where Google assumes you are a bot and not a human?
      • bloaf 6y ago
        I get them all the dang time Suppose I want to search for a textbook in an open directory. This query will get flagged almost immediately: textbook -inurl:htm -inurl:html -inurl:asp intitle:"index of" +(epub|mobi|pdf|txt) Suppose someone says to me "no one in this forum believes (dumb conspiracy theory from Obama-times)" or "the lamestream media never reported on X." Naturally I will do a few quick iterations of conspiracy related "terms" site:someforum.com before:2017-01-01 which will trigger a humanity check if you iterate too quickly. I got hit recently when the news about Tucker Carlson's racist writer came out. I set out to find the full threads in which the offending comments were made. Iterating through combinations of text, usernames, and urls like "full text of offensive post" username before:date-news-broke -inurl:news got me checked every 3rd search or so.
• flywheel 6y ago
  Prediction: Using the methods of "dorking", this is the only page on the internet among 10 million+ results that is calling this "dorking".
  • montjoy 6y ago
    I hope it doesn’t catch on since it makes me die a little inside. It’s a very Reddit-type word though. I can easily imagine it being used by non-technical folk and tech journalists.
  • wglb 6y ago
    Long time reference. See for example https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1CDGOYI_enUS672US689&hl=en-US&sxsrf=ALeKk00r0smpY0nxNSjr0xEolnhENaG-4w:1597027744618&q=google+dorking+cheat+sheet&nirf=google+hacking+cheat+sheet&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiO7Kf7z4_rAhUEU80KHQ-ZBvcQ8BYoAXoECAsQAw&biw=414&bih=622&dpr=3 https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1CDGOYI_enUS672US689&hl=en...
• harimau777 6y ago
  Is there any way to search the actual page text? I find that often I remember some unique turn of phase from the page that I'm looking for and it would be extremely helpful to be able to simply search for that.
  • abarrettwilsdon 6y ago
    `intext:phrase` and `allintext:multi part phrase` generally "phrase" works well too
    • harimau777 6y ago
      Thank you!
• Shared404 6y ago
  Syntax for doing things like this with DDG: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/syntax/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sy...
  • kps 6y ago
    I'd switch to DDG in a half second if they supported the full query syntax of altavista.digital.com (see http://jkorpela.fi/altavista/ http://jkorpela.fi/altavista/ if you've forgotten). Disclaimer: I work for, um, Google.
    • Shared404 6y ago
      I do wish they supported a larger search syntax. My current workaround is I have a massive bookmark folder of alternative search engines that I try if I'm not having luck narrowing things down enough.
      • lsiebert 6y ago
        That might make an interesting blog post
        • Shared404 6y ago
          I'm still mid-setting up a blog, but I'll keep that in mind once I've got it up and running. I'm afraid it probably wouldn't be that interesting to HN'ers though, because this is where I found most of them.
          • jidiculous 6y ago
            I'm pretty new to HN so I'd really find that post interesting – having them listed in one place would be useful.
            • Shared404 6y ago
• jrochkind1 6y ago
  Why is this called "dorking"? "Dorking" is a word that just means using search engines to find very specific data? This seems bizarre to me. Why does this need a special word? Or it actually means using search operators beyond natural language entry? That's what this page seems to be about? I don't know why that would be called "dorking" either?
  • p410n3 6y ago
    It all started with a def con talk if I remember correctly. https://youtu.be/N3dzVl40lQA https://youtu.be/N3dzVl40lQA
• harha 6y ago
  I think it would be useful to be able to explicitly search around knowledge graph entities or site topics, e.g. a programming language, a city, a season, without having that single/specific term. So a search including all sites related to an entity, say Munich or python along with the terms the user is searching because a page might then not specifically include the entity in its keywords or the text on the site or have a different language or use a synonym. I’m sure search engines consider this somewhat, but explicitly activating such a feature would be a great improvement for the user. Stackexchange has this feature with tags (using []), with user curated tags. Would be nice to have in DDG or google.
  • epanchin 6y ago
    Businesses don’t game stackexchange.
  • mitchdoogle 6y ago
    I would just like to create my own groups. As another user said, tagging would probably be gamed by SEO companies, but if people could use their own groupings, that problem wouldn't occur. Their could even be curated lists out there of specific sites that fall within a general category. At the least, I'd like to be able to block sites from ever appearing in my results. I've used add-ons for that which work pretty well, but it should be built-in in my opinion
• iandanforth 6y ago
  The email specific queries don't appear to work. The "@" is ignored by google so you just get results for the domain string.
  • abarrettwilsdon 6y ago
    The first two appear to still work, but the third does not. The permutation searches are tricky because you don't know if a lack of results means the email does not exist, or just hasn't been posted anywhere indexed Will update and credit
• malwarebytess 6y ago
  NLP and to a lesser extent SEO has vastly diminished the value of this type of searching.
• ricardo81 6y ago
  Worth pointing out if you do some of these crafted operator searches quite quickly, you'll end up getting blocked or having to complete a captcha. I haven't done so in a while so I'm not sure what their current behaviour is. Main reason being there's plenty data mining, e.g. looking for "powered by wordpress" and vulnerable versions, and generally all kinds of data mining that involve very specific requests for information, likely queries that aren't creating revenue, either.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
  I have a question for anyone reading this thread: Do you believe you can get consistent results with any search? For example, if we pick some uncommon search terms will we get the same results on the first search, the second search, the third, etc. Or will the results change? I did a search with some terms from one of the comments in this thread, in quotes. The first search returned only one result: this thread. As I searched the same quoted terms repeatedly along with additional terms, more results were returned that contained the exact string of original terms. Surprised by this, I tried a search with only the original terms, in quotes, once again. This time the search returned more than just the one result.
  • abarrettwilsdon 6y ago
    If it's specific enough, the SERP should stay the same until someone else publishes the same thing e.g. the search of another article "set up Google Sheets APIs (and treat Sheets like a database)" turns up my site and a couple Twitter threads talking about it (plus a phishing site which has scraped and republished it). I presume that will stay the same b/c it's such a specific title phrase (but not because searches are necessarily deterministic)
    • 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
      I am skeptical that quotes really work like the plus operator used to work. For example, try searching the following string in quotes: "the SERP should stay the same". https://www.google.com/search?q=%22the%20SERP%20should%20stay%20the%20same%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22the%20SERP%20should%20sta... Now, the logical presumption, assuming Google works as people say it does, is that each result will contain that exact string. If no results contain the string, then you should receive no results. However, for me, results are returned. Did each of the results from that search contain this exact string? For me, they did not.
      • abarrettwilsdon 6y ago
        When I run that query, it returns `No results found for "the SERP should stay the same".` Then defaults to providing the SERP for the fallback query: `Results for the SERP should stay the same (without quotes):` That SERP should change when this HN thread is indexed though
• indit 6y ago
  A very comprehensive and frequently updated list is here: https://www.exploit-db.com/google-hacking-database https://www.exploit-db.com/google-hacking-database
• j45 6y ago
  This reminds me of an article I once read about the neat tricks that used to exist in altavista.com search engine
• somerandomboi 6y ago
  It would be useful to use “Dorking”, even for non-programmers.Good article!
• kace91 6y ago
  Back when I was a teenager,I had a book titled "hacking with Google" by Johny long that was basically all specific searching tips and terms (oriented to find open vulnerabilities and the like, but still very useful in general despite the tacky name). I wonder how much of it is still valid after all this time.
  • Mandatum 6y ago
    I've always heard the search terms as "Google dorks", but never heard it called "dorking".. Seems Google articles on the subject prove me wrong.
  • mcswell 6y ago
    Back when I was a teenager, I had a slide rule. I can guarantee that a slide rule is still valid, so long as you're not interested in more than two or three significant digits, and you don't want to add or subtract.
• aaron695 6y ago
  Learn to use time. It's a drop down. The web is slowly atrophying. Going back in time for originals makes a big difference. Reverse is also true. After a blow up the mass media will repeat the same thing on mass and swamp results. Often an article in the last hour might have what you want, like the database link they are all talking about.
• kobieyc 6y ago
  Anyone here remember Fravia? https://web.archive.org/web/20191201105758/http://search.lores.eu/indexo.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20191201105758/http://search.lor...
  • bmn__ 6y ago
    I do. Alec's blog entry is outright pathetic in comparison. It does not even scratch the surface of fravia+'s treasure chest.
• w0mbat 6y ago
  The - prefix operator is very useful and still works. Google should reinstate the + prefix operator. It was only taken out because it screwed up the search results for Google+, which is dead now.
  • kilroy123 6y ago
    I find myself having to use the "-" prefix a lot these days.
• huffmsa 6y ago
  Don't you just love it when you're carefully crafted search finally displays the words or phrases you want in the snippet on the results page but then when you actually open the link and CTRL+F for it it's nowhere to be found? Not even in the raw HTML? I sure do.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• peter_d_sherman 6y ago
  A few thoughts: 1) Great information! 2) It seems like the world could use a book like Joe Celko's "SQL For Smarties", but for search engines. Yes, there are such books already, most notably O'Reilly's "Google Hacks" by Rael Dornfest, Paul Bausch, Tara Calishain -- but I think the world could still use a book covering more search engines and search techniques. The above web page would be a great starting point to an endeavor like that. 3) "Dorking" (love that term!) -- is going into my 2020 vocabulary lexicon! <g>
• Daub 6y ago
  Effective Google-foo is one of the first things I teach my first year students. Few greater life skills exist.
• zhacker 6y ago
  I think I should rename filechef.com to dorkchef now
• buffin 6y ago
  As a teenager, I used to search for "Index Of <movie name>" for movies. 2/3 times, I was able to find and download the movie I wanted to watch.
• Tepix 6y ago
  There's a related thing you can do. If you have web pages somewhere, create a bunch of blank web pages with just one random word on them (something like "ristordshest") and then create an index page that links to them all. Then link to that index page somewhere where noone except web crawlers will notice it. Then wait a few weeks. Now when you a) sell something on eBay where you are not allowed to link to the product support page page or some other stupid restriction like that b) want to promote something on Instagram where you can't link to it Ask people to google for the search term. There will be only one result: Yours.