Google Search Tips

Basic Search Techniques

  • Use the plus sign (+) to force a search for an overly common word. Use the minus sign (-) to exclude a term from a search. No space follows these signs.
  • To search for a phrase, supply the phrase surrounded by double quotes (" ").
  • A period (.) serves as a single-character wildcard.
  • An asterisk (*) represents any word—not the completion of a word, as is traditionally used.

Google advanced operators help refine searches. Advanced operators use a syntax such as the following:

operator:search_term
Notice that there's no space between the operator, the colon, and the search term.

  • The site: operator instructs Google to restrict a search to a specific web site or domain. The web site to search must be supplied after the colon.
  • The filetype: operator instructs Google to search only within the text of a particular type of file. The file type to search must be supplied after the colon. Don't include a period before the file extension.
  • The link: operator instructs Google to search within hyperlinks for a search term.
  • The cache: operator displays the version of a web page as it appeared when Google crawled the site. The URL of the site must be supplied after the colon.
  • The intitle: operator instructs Google to search for a term within the title of a document.
  • The inurl: operator instructs Google to search only within the URL (web address) of a document. The search term must follow the colon. 
  • The ext: operator is useful for searching for torrents

Site Mapping
To find every web page Google has crawled for a specific site, use the

site: operator. Consider the following query:

site:

http://www.microsoft.com microsoft

This query searches for the word

There are some exceptions to this rule. If a link on the Microsoft web page points back to the IP address of the Microsoft web server, Google will cache that page as belonging to the IP address, not the

Finding Directory Listings
Directory listings provide a list of files and directories in a browser window instead of the typical text-and graphics mix generally associated with web pages. These pages offer a great environment for deep information gathering

Locating directory listings with Google is fairly straightforward. Most directory listings begin with the phrase

  • Index of Native American Resources on the Internet
  • LibDex—Worldwide index of library catalogues
  • Iowa State Entomology Index of Internet Resources

Judging from the titles of these documents, it's obvious that not only are these web pages intentional, they're also not the directory listings we're looking for. Several alternate queries provide more accurate results:

microsoft, restricting the search to the http://www.microsoft.com web site. How many pages on the Microsoft web server contain the word microsoft? According to Google, all of them! Google searches not only the content of a page, but the title and URL as well. The word microsoft appears in the URL of every page on http://www.microsoft.com. With a single query, an attacker gains a rundown of every web page on a site cached by Google.http://www.microsoft.com web server. Index of, which also shows in the title. An obvious query to find this type of page might be intitle:index.of, which may find pages with the term index of in the title of the document. Unfortunately, this query will return a large number of false positives, such as pages with the following titles:

intitle:index.of "parent directory"
intitle:index.of name size
inurl:"index of/"

These queries indeed provide directory listings by not only focusing on

index.of in the title, but on keywords often found inside directory listings, such as parent directory, name, and size. Obviously, this search can be combined with other searches to find files of directories located in directory listings.