11 ms·

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

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.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
  No longer have Google Chrome on any devices, switched over to Chromium Edge. Same browser, different overloads. Left the default search engine as Bing, but only because Duck Duck Go is useless for geographicly local search.
  - jimnotgym 6y ago
    Useless? "Plumber Timbuktu" returns plumbers in Timbuktu.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
      I'm on Launceston Tasmania, DDG returns results for Launceston Cornwall England. I'll try again though as your sibling comment suggests it's improved.
  - RonanTheGrey 6y ago
    I don't know what they did but several weeks ago DDG got magically better at geographic local search (I do not live in the US and pound my head on that one too). One day I actually DID need to find something local and so I dutifully typed my search into the FF url bar and hit enter. My default search is DDG but my brain stroked off for a second because the results that came back were 100% what I was looking for and I thought I was on Google. Give it a shot again, they're getting better.
- abarrettwilsdon 6y ago
  Updated the article to reflect and credited you for the contribution!
- EE84M3i 6y ago
  When you say "deprecated", you mean as in "discontinued" right? Not just like, discouraged?
  - flywheel 6y ago
    Whoever the first developer was that used "deprecated" got it kind of wrong, the word should have been "depreciated". Deprecate: "express disapproval of." Depreciate: "diminish in value over a period of time." I kind of cringe when other developers say "deprecated". Edit: Versioning and not removing APIs is kind of the way to go, so you don't break client apps that possibly can't be updated easily or at all. "Depreciated" is a far better word to use with a far better outcome. AWS versions their APIs, they don't remove old ones. "I disapprove of using this API and we're taking it away at some random date" vs "this isn't the latest API, use the current one for new development" seems like a pretty stark difference in thinking to me. YMMV.
    - hamburglar 6y ago
      This is a jaw-droppingly arrogant attitude. You're trying to justify your own incorrect usage by asserting that the person who coined the term decades ago "got it kind of wrong"? And you cringe when others get it right? "Depreciated" is absolutely the wrong term, because it implies that the value is less, when the intent is to communicate "this is still fully functional, but you are warned away from it because it is targeted for future removal." Deprecated.
    - tines 6y ago
      But "express disapproval of" is exactly the meaning intended when we say that a feature is deprecated. It signifies that it is best practice not to use it.
      - harha 6y ago
        If it’s given as a warning then yes, e.g. the dplyr package in R sometimes outputs “feature xyz is deprecated and will be removed in version x.x”. Often though it’s used when the feature is already removed, i.e., it’s not only best practice not to use it, but also impossible with that version.
- GordonS 6y ago
  Worth mentioning that even if you put a term in double quotes, Google still tries to be too clever - you are not guaranteed to get results that contain your quotes search term :/
  - devjungle 6y ago
    This must be a recent change? It's been driving me nuts lately. I have to resort to adding a lot of negated search terms to compensate but it's still sub optimal.
    - JasonFruit 6y ago
      It seems to me that after a few negated search terms are included, they are taken less strictly; "minus" seems to mean "probably minus".
    - GordonS 6y ago
      No, this has been the case for a long time, years anyway. I don't know if it goes back quite as far as when they removed the '+' operator tho. But bejesus, this drives me nuts! If I know the double quotes function even exists, then Google should know I actually want to use it as intended - it shouldn't decide "yeah, but maybe you'd like these irrelevant results too!"
      - jon_richards 6y ago
        I think it’s primarily for people copying and pasting something like an error message, which may have user-specific data in quotes. That should be what “not many results for...” is for, but Google is always trying to optimize away those clicks. Maybe they could add a “programatic” search feature with documented syntax for power users.
        hwillis 6y ago
        A moderate-length string of quoted words (>5?) used to return zero or near zero results and a suggestion to try without quotes- imo ideal
- Razengan 6y ago
  Google has been gradually becoming useless for anything but the most basic/popular terms, over the last few years. Just now I had to give up trying to look up "the term for fans that are paid actors" and variations. Asking on Reddit or Stack Overflow would be faster than Google's search engine for some things now.
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.
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/
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.
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. :(
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)
malwarebytess 6y ago
NLP and to a lesser extent SEO has vastly diminished the value of this type of searching.
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!
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
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
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.
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
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.

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.
TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
No longer have Google Chrome on any devices, switched over to Chromium Edge. Same browser, different overloads. Left the default search engine as Bing, but only because Duck Duck Go is useless for geographicly local search.
- jimnotgym 6y ago
  Useless? "Plumber Timbuktu" returns plumbers in Timbuktu.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
    I'm on Launceston Tasmania, DDG returns results for Launceston Cornwall England. I'll try again though as your sibling comment suggests it's improved.
- RonanTheGrey 6y ago
  I don't know what they did but several weeks ago DDG got magically better at geographic local search (I do not live in the US and pound my head on that one too). One day I actually DID need to find something local and so I dutifully typed my search into the FF url bar and hit enter. My default search is DDG but my brain stroked off for a second because the results that came back were 100% what I was looking for and I thought I was on Google. Give it a shot again, they're getting better.
abarrettwilsdon 6y ago
Updated the article to reflect and credited you for the contribution!
EE84M3i 6y ago
When you say "deprecated", you mean as in "discontinued" right? Not just like, discouraged?
- flywheel 6y ago
  Whoever the first developer was that used "deprecated" got it kind of wrong, the word should have been "depreciated". Deprecate: "express disapproval of." Depreciate: "diminish in value over a period of time." I kind of cringe when other developers say "deprecated". Edit: Versioning and not removing APIs is kind of the way to go, so you don't break client apps that possibly can't be updated easily or at all. "Depreciated" is a far better word to use with a far better outcome. AWS versions their APIs, they don't remove old ones. "I disapprove of using this API and we're taking it away at some random date" vs "this isn't the latest API, use the current one for new development" seems like a pretty stark difference in thinking to me. YMMV.
  - hamburglar 6y ago
    This is a jaw-droppingly arrogant attitude. You're trying to justify your own incorrect usage by asserting that the person who coined the term decades ago "got it kind of wrong"? And you cringe when others get it right? "Depreciated" is absolutely the wrong term, because it implies that the value is less, when the intent is to communicate "this is still fully functional, but you are warned away from it because it is targeted for future removal." Deprecated.
  - tines 6y ago
    But "express disapproval of" is exactly the meaning intended when we say that a feature is deprecated. It signifies that it is best practice not to use it.
    - harha 6y ago
      If it’s given as a warning then yes, e.g. the dplyr package in R sometimes outputs “feature xyz is deprecated and will be removed in version x.x”. Often though it’s used when the feature is already removed, i.e., it’s not only best practice not to use it, but also impossible with that version.
GordonS 6y ago
Worth mentioning that even if you put a term in double quotes, Google still tries to be too clever - you are not guaranteed to get results that contain your quotes search term :/
- devjungle 6y ago
  This must be a recent change? It's been driving me nuts lately. I have to resort to adding a lot of negated search terms to compensate but it's still sub optimal.
  - JasonFruit 6y ago
    It seems to me that after a few negated search terms are included, they are taken less strictly; "minus" seems to mean "probably minus".
  - GordonS 6y ago
    No, this has been the case for a long time, years anyway. I don't know if it goes back quite as far as when they removed the '+' operator tho. But bejesus, this drives me nuts! If I know the double quotes function even exists, then Google should know I actually want to use it as intended - it shouldn't decide "yeah, but maybe you'd like these irrelevant results too!"
    - jon_richards 6y ago
      I think it’s primarily for people copying and pasting something like an error message, which may have user-specific data in quotes. That should be what “not many results for...” is for, but Google is always trying to optimize away those clicks. Maybe they could add a “programatic” search feature with documented syntax for power users.
      - hwillis 6y ago
        A moderate-length string of quoted words (>5?) used to return zero or near zero results and a suggestion to try without quotes- imo ideal
Razengan 6y ago
Google has been gradually becoming useless for anything but the most basic/popular terms, over the last few years. Just now I had to give up trying to look up "the term for fans that are paid actors" and variations. Asking on Reddit or Stack Overflow would be faster than Google's search engine for some things now.

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.

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/

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.

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. :(

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)

malwarebytess 6y ago

NLP and to a lesser extent SEO has vastly diminished the value of this type of searching.

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!

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

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

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.

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

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.