by Rich Rousseau
17. February 2006 00:51
Google is a very useful and powerful resource. I google
daily (yes, it’s a verb now). I can't imagine using a computer nowadays
without google or the internet, though I am old enough to have used computers
before the internet was mainstream. In fact,
my first computer didn't
have a hard drive, floppy or any other non-volatile backing store, but that’s
another post.
The purpose of this post is to share some advanced googling
features.I came across a post by
CyberWire that points out some of the slightly more advanced Google search
features. At the bare minimum, review the use of quotes and the "+" and "-" symbols. If you are still interested
after that, I would also recommend the book“Google Hacking for
Penetration Testers”.
If I had to choose one advanced Google feature that I think
everyone should add to their repertoire, it would be the “site:” prefix. You can use this in your search to limit Google
to only searching a particular domain. The neat part about this is that you can also use wildcards.
For example, if you wanted to search only government sites
for information on renewing your passport, enter the following “renew passport
site:*.gov”. This will limit your search
to the .gov top level domain. Is Amazon’s
website search not returning the results you expected? Try using “mybooktopic site:amazon.com”.
I have to admit that I also use the “define:” prefix quite a bit
too. There is a firefox extension that
allows you to highlight a word, right click and select “define” from a menu
that will open a new tab with the definition. A very helpful tool if your vocabulary ain’t what it used to
be. (I wrote an "extension" that allowed IE to do the same thing,
if you're interested comment below and I will provide the code)
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