‘Google is infinite. The Internet can theoretically grow forever, and Google will forever index its infinite growth’ reads a comment on the web. Needless to say, Google has become a intrinsic part of our online journey. From students to professionals rely on the power of google indexes everyday to gain access to the wealth of information available on servers all across the globe.
Founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in the year 1973, Google has become a brand in itself with its innovative products and technologies providing for most of our online needs. With its headquarters in Mountain View, California it has a massive infrastructure hosting one of the largest and powerful grid computing systems in the world. With more than a dozen data centers in places like Dublin, Ireland; Virginia; and in California and Atlanta, Dalles, Ore etc., By having such a geographically distributed data center, google is able to deliver much faster than its competitors.
Well, now that you learnt some facts about your favorite search engine, lets see if you do really know how to squeeze the juice out of google while using it to search for information. These tips/tricks and operators are used in combination with your regular search term.
Tip 1: Advance Operators
Google advanced operators help refine searches they are included as part of a standard Google query.
intitle : intitle:Samachar would return webpages that contains the word Samachar in the title
inurl : inurl:India would list pages that contains the word India in the URL or webaddress
site : site:rediff.com ganguly would show all references to the word Ganguly within the rediff.com website
filetype : filetype:pdf receipe would retrieve pages with the words receipe in them and with filetype as a PDF (Adobe Acrobat’s portable document format). You could replace pdf with jpg or bmp to retrieve pictures or with doc to get word documents. Yes, avi, mpeg, mpg or mp3 would retrieve video and audio files. Try type:mp3 jennifer lopez (you could also use type instead of filetype)
More at http://www.google.com/help/operators.html
Tip 2: Boolean Operators
You could also combine queries using boolean operators (these are operators that are used to represent natural language terms like AND, OR, NOT etc.,)
Google ignores common terms while it does searches, example a search for Star Wars Episode I will ignore I. Hence to force google to include a term in its search query use the + operator. Example: Googling for Star Wars Episode +I will now run return results with Star Wars Episode I.
To make google search not only for the terms you have entered but also for its synonyms, place a tilde sign ~ sign (~ is normally the key just before the 1 on your keyboard, hold the shift key) immediately infront of your search term.. Example: ~fun will return results that contains fun, humor, jokes etc.,
The OR operator allows you to search for occurrences of either of two search words. Example: tour baguio OR palawan will give tours that are available in either baguio or palawan.
The AND operator forces google to search for pages that contain both the search terms. Example: subic AND snorkeling will fetch information on snorkeling in the subic.
The – operator filters out searches by removing the terms that follow the – sign. Example: aishwarya –rai will filter out all instances of aishwarya rai from your search result.
More at http://www.google.com/help/refinesearch.html
Tip 3: Range Operator
Google also allows you to run a search based on a number range. Example: camera $1000..$3000 will list webpage which talks about cameras in the range of 1000 $ to 3000 $.
Enough of such innocuous operators; lets try something more sinister with google.
Hack 1: Try ext:pdf confidential “for internal use only” will retrieve results that contains PDF files that were supposed to be confidential and marked “for internal use only”.
Hack 2: Try ext:xls buget site:mil will retrieve results from military websites (.mil domain referes to military websites) that talks about budget and is of type excel spreadsheet.
Hack 3: Try index of +mp3 +shakira will present you with the root index of some websites that hosts mp3 files of shakira.
Hack 4: Try VISA 4060000000000000..4060999999999999 used to list VISA credit card numbers within that mentioned range. You would be surprised to see how many merchants are careless with the credit card numbers of their customers. (This query looks to have been blocked for the while)
More powerful and much more evil queries are used by hackers to do reconnaissance to check for websites with security flaws. If a website administrator is not aware of the google style of indexing then he might be exposing content to the world that he might otherwise not want to. Administrators could stop google from crawling certain parts of their website by using a file called as robots.txt which list the directories that google should refrain from crawling.
Happy Googling!
Comments