Google Hacks

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Google Hacks – Part 1

Essentially, there are two types of search engines, the first is called the searchable subject index. This type searches only titles and descriptions of sites. The other type is the full text search engine which uses "spiders" pieces of code to index billions of pages across the net. These pages can be searched by title or content, making for a much more efficient search application. Currently, on the Internet it's Google which is the prime exponent of this type of search.

The Google search engine is probably one of the most useful tool ever spawned on the Internet and anyone who uses it to simply check on a website based on key word(s) is hardly using a fraction of what it can do. Lets start that exploration with some of the terms you can use to add a bit more power to your search.

Google will search for all words in a string the default, but by using the operator OR you can specify one term or another

Search: cat, dog generates all the pages that mention "cat and dog"

Search: cat OR dog generates all the pages that mention "cat" and all the pages that mention "dog"

Search: food (cat OR dog) comes up with the terms Cat or Dog along with the word food in Google OR is often replaced with the programming character “ | ” (called pipe)

In addition to simple site search, Google uses a special syntax called “inurl” to let you search the contents of any URL on the net, this will dig down below the main domain into the sub-domains of the site for the content you specify. This is perfect for searching domains with a lot of subs and also perfect for locating useful indexes. Have a look at the examples below.

Try typing the following into your Google address bar

-inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:"index of" +"last modified" +"parent directory" +description +size +(.mp3|.wma) ""

This search term will generate a list of website with indexes of MP3 and WMA files and you can browse and download to your hearts content. But say you want to search for a specific file

-inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:"index of" +"last modified" +"parent directory" +description +size +(.mp3|.wma) "Peter Gabriel"

To find the file of your choice just replace “Peter Gabriel” with the artist or band of your choice. Looking for applications, try this search

-inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:"index of" +"last modified" +"parent directory" +description +size +(.exe|.zip) ""

For a specific application try:

-inurl: (htm|html|php) intitle:"index of" +"last modified" +"parent directory" +description +size +(.exe|.zip) "googleearth"

Here we have searched for the GoogleEarth application.

Need to find a torrent file? Here I have asked Google to search for all Linux torrents

linux filetype:torrent

But you can replace the “linux” search term with whatever you want. Google provide a handy search tool which you can download to your own desktop have a look at http://code.google.com/p/googlehacks/

More on Google Hack next time.

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