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Google Advanced Syntax Query

Posted by absnet on 26 February 2010


It can be denied, that google is the most popular search engine. Their search result is more complete compared to yahoo or bing, for example.  It’s argue-able, of course, but the news that yahoo and microsoft ready to work together to compete with google is a good proof for this.

I often found that my friend complaining about google search result, they said that google return result which is not they looking for. Actually there’s a little trick to increase your google result filtering. And here’s some of them:

[ intitle: ]
The “intitle:” syntax helps Google restrict the search results to pages containing that word in the title. For
example, “intitle: login password” (without quotes) will return links to those pages that has the word
"login" in their title, and the word "password" anywhere in the page.

Similarly, if one has to query for more than one word in the page title then in that case “allintitle:” can be
used instead of “intitle” to get the list of pages containing all those words in its title. For example using
“intitle: login intitle: password” is same as querying “allintitle: login password”.

[ inurl: ]
The “inurl:” syntax restricts the search results to those URLs containing the search keyword. For
example: “inurl: passwd” (without quotes) will return only links to those pages that have "passwd" in the
URL.

Similarly, if one has to query for more than one word in an URL then in that case “allinurl:” can be used
instead of “inurl” to get the list of URLs containing all those search keywords in it. For example: “allinurl:
etc/passwd“ will look for the URLs containing “etc” and “passwd”. The slash (“/”) between the words will
be ignored by Google.


[ site: ]
The “site:” syntax restricts Google to query for certain keywords in a particular site or domain. For
example: “exploits site:hackingspirits.com” (without quotes) will look for the keyword “exploits” in those
pages present in all the links of the domain “hackingspirits.com”. There should not be any space between
“site:” and the “domain name”.


[ filetype: ]
This “filetype:” syntax restricts Google search for files on internet with particular extensions (i.e. doc, pdf
or ppt etc). For example: “filetype:doc site:gov confidential” (without quotes) will look for files with “.doc”
extension in all government domains with “.gov” extension and containing the word “confidential” either in
the pages or in the “.doc” file. i.e. the result will contain the links to all confidential word document files on
the government sites.


[ link: ]
“link:” syntax will list down webpages that have links to the specified webpage. For Example:
“link:www.securityfocus.com” will list webpages that have links pointing to the SecurityFocus homepage.
Note there can be no space between the "link:" and the web page url.

[ related: ]
The “related:” will list web pages that are "similar" to a specified web page. For Example:
“related:www.securityfocus.com” will list web pages that are similar to the Securityfocus homepage. Note
there can be no space between the "related:" and the web page url.


[ cache: ]
The query “cache:” will show the version of the web page that Google has in its cache. For Example:
“cache:www.hackingspirits.com” will show Google’s cache of the Google homepage. Note there can be
no space between the "cache:" and the web page url.
If you include other words in the query, Google will highlight those words within the cached document. For
Example: “cache:www.hackingspirits.com guest” will show the cached content with the word "guest"
highlighted.


[ intext: ]
The “intext:” syntax searches for words in a particular website. It ignores links or URLs and page titles.
For example: “intext:exploits” (without quotes) will return only links to those web pages that has the
search keyword "exploits" in its webpage.


[ phonebook: ]
“phonebook” searches for U.S. street address and phone number information. For Example:
“phonebook:Lisa+CA” will list down all names of person having “Lisa” in their names and located in
“California (CA)”. This can be used as a great tool for hackers incase someone want to do dig personal
information for social engineering.

Addition

This is a little trick that work for me:

If you want a sentence to be search instead of part of their string, then put the sentence in double quote. For example, you want to search ENGINEERING EBOOKS, then you should write : “engineering ebooks”.

To expand this knowledge, suppose you want to search google adsense books only  from rapidshare.com, you can write something like this GOOGLE ADSENSErapidshare.com/files”. All this work for any site. The most important is, try to find unique pattern from a search.

Happy searching…

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