Better Google Searching for Non-Malicious Users (Draft-Unpublished)

Patrick Trinkle Dept. of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, University of Maryland Baltimore County, Baltimore, MD, 21250 tri1@umbc.edu March 18, 2007

Methods

Google hacking provides information about sites and companies that they do not necessarily realize is on the internet. This includes poorly congured or unknown web servers, printers on the internet, personnel spreadsheets, etc. Similar search techniques can be easily applied to normal queries to yield better results. Case and point, searching for discovery yields 122,000,000 results, whereas discovery site:nasa.gov yields 527,000. Using 1 tag yielded 0.432% of the original results. The use of tags can dramatically narrow your results as well as more specically target your information. Before you decide that narrowing your results is amazing there are a couple disadvantages, such as missing the target by being too specic, or limiting the scope of the search. There are also special reserved characters which can also be used in queries to narrow your query. The site tag requires the results to come from the specied site or domain or region, such as site:nasa.gov, or site:de, or site:cnn.com. The inurl tag requires the results have the string in the url of the webpage. Allinurl requires that all the words be in the url, not necessarily in order. The intitle tag narrows the query by the text in the title of the webpage. Intext is similar except the words are in the body of the webpage. If your intent is to nd a pdf le, such as a manual, or a spreadsheet; the tag letype restricts results to actual les stored on web servers and linked through websites, versus webpage les, unless otherwise specied. The link tag returns all webpages which have a link to the site you specied. There is also the daterange tag which uses julian dates, and is not terribly easy to use.

The following are some of, if not all of, the special reserved characters. Parentheses are for grouping, such as ( letype:pdf letype:doc ). The pipe is for or logic, Administrators Only Authentication Required . The usage of quotes requires an exact quotation in the text of the webpage or le. The plus and minus narrow the results by requiring the piece of query or requiring the negation of the piece respectively. Google also has built in tools such as conversion, dene, and calculator. Conversion will convert between two measurements: conversion 10 gallons to cubic inches. Dene retrieves a denition of the word: dene psychotic. Calculator is essentially a query driven calculator: 2 * 10 + 7. As everyone knows there are other useful Google tools, such as Maps, Froogle, Scholar, News, U.S. Government Searches, Linux Searches, Macintosh Searches, Microsoft Searches, Book Search, and many more. You can now make very specic queries, do cool things quickly without going to another website, very specialized searches with already built in areas, and save the world.