If you bother googling most of the time for your desired content where you don’t end up with the content of your actual need, you could try some of the search tricks to get better results & enhance your search experience or you could just have some fun with Google!
Infographics credits: Hackcollege.com
1. Specific file types: Filetype:xls (for excel files)
Google allows to search for specific file types, so instead of getting html-files as a result (websites)
You can directly get the files formats you are looking for. But maybe more interesting would be searching for *.db files and *.mdb files. Google by the way doesn’t tell you you can search for *.db and *mdb files. I wonder what other file types one can search for. Things that come to mind are *.cfg files or *.pwd files, *.dat files, stuff like that. Try and think of something that might get you some interesting results.
2.Search in url : Inurl:admin
Another useful search option is the inurl: option which allows one to search for a certain word one would want to be in the url. This gives you the opportunity to search for specific directories/folders, especially in combination with the “index of” option, about which I will talk later on. An example would be inurl:admin which would give you results of website urls that have the word “admin” in the url.
3. Search in Index : “Index of”
The index of option is another option that isn’t especially thought of by the creators of google, but comes in very handy. If you use the “index of” string you will find directory listings of specific folders on servers.
An example could be: ‘index of”admin or index.of.admin
which would get you many directory listings of admin folders. (don’t forget to use the quotes in this case since you are looking for the entire “index of” string, not just for “index” and “of”)
4. Site Search : site:
The site option allows you to come up with results that only belong to a certain domain name extension or to a specific site. For example one could search for .com sites or .box.sk sites or .nl sites, but also for results from just one site, but more interesting might be to search for specific military or government websites. An example of a search string would be: Site:mil or site:gov or Site:neworder.box.sk “board”
5. Search in Title: Intitle:
Intitle is another nice option. It allows you to search for html files that have a certain word or words in the title. The format would be intitle:wordhere. You could check out what words appear in the title of some online control panel or content management system and then search google for this word with the intitle option, to find these control panel pages.
6. Search for links: Link
The Link option allows you to check which sites link to a specific site. As described in Hacking Exposed Third Edition, this could be useful: These search engines provide a handy facility that allows you to search for all sites that have links back to the target organization’s domain. This may not seem significant at first but let’s explore the implications. Suppose someone in an organization decides to put up a rogue website at home or on the target network’s site.
7. Combining search options
The above mentioned search options might or might not be known to you, but even though they can amount to some interesting results, it’s a fact that when you start combining them, that’s when google’s magic starts to show. You got to find a search string that gets the results you want.
Hope this may help you. Happy Searching! 😉
