Dorking: the use of search engines to find very specific data

A few corrections:<p>The + (formerly used to force a term to be present in the result) and ~ (also find synonyms) operators have been deprecated.<p>Google now advises to wrap the word in quotes instead of using the +. Google will also automatically look for synonyms without the use of ~.<p>I have seen &#x27;AROUND(n)&#x27; mentioned in many other places working as a proximity operator in Google, but I don&#x27;t believe that is true and haven&#x27;t found it to work in any logical way.<p>Also the use of parentheses to nest queries is not necessary in Google. It is actually required for Bing on complicated queries though.

Might be my librarian career bias but I&#x27;m always surprised at how few people know about query operators. Ironically as Google search seems to be ignoring vital parts of people&#x27;s queries, they are becoming more needed now, whereas years ago I would have assumed a constantly improving Google search would get better at determining what I was looking for.

Last week I blocked every * .google.* domain on my network except &quot;youtube-ui.l.google.com&quot;.<p>Google Search: (1) ask a natural language question (since actual search is hobbled) (2) get unrelated garbage and ads back (3) blame yourself for &quot;not being technical enough&quot; to understand why the results aren&#x27;t actually garbage.<p>Google Search has deteriorated to the point that so far I haven&#x27;t missed it <i>at all</i>.

I live two towns over from Dorking.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Dorking" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Dorking</a>

This is a pretty common practice among SEOs for a variety of different reasons. They are also known as advanced search operators.<p>Ahrefs has a pretty comprehensive list here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ahrefs.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;google-advanced-search-operators&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ahrefs.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;google-advanced-search-operators&#x2F;</a>

I think it would be useful to be able to explicitly search around knowledge graph entities or site topics, e.g. a programming language, a city, a season, without having that single&#x2F;specific term.<p>So a search including all sites related to an entity, say Munich or python along with the terms the user is searching because a page might then not specifically include the entity in its keywords or the text on the site or have a different language or use a synonym.<p>I’m sure search engines consider this somewhat, but explicitly activating such a feature would be a great improvement for the user.<p>Stackexchange has this feature with tags (using []), with user curated tags. Would be nice to have in DDG or google.

Syntax for doing things like this with DDG:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.duckduckgo.com&#x2F;duckduckgo-help-pages&#x2F;results&#x2F;syntax&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.duckduckgo.com&#x2F;duckduckgo-help-pages&#x2F;results&#x2F;sy...</a>

Exploit database with more dorks<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.exploit-db.com&#x2F;google-hacking-database" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.exploit-db.com&#x2F;google-hacking-database</a>

I have a question for anyone reading this thread:<p>Do you believe you can get consistent results with <i>any</i> search?<p>For example, if we pick some <i>uncommon</i> search terms will we get the same results on the first search, the second search, the third, etc. Or will the results change?<p>I did a search with some terms from one of the comments in this thread, in quotes. The first search returned only one result: this thread.<p>As I searched the same quoted terms repeatedly along with additional terms, more results were returned that contained the exact string of original terms. Surprised by this, I tried a search with only the original terms, in quotes, once again. This time the search returned more than just the one result.

Dorking is not that easy to do, Google is very easy on assuming you are being malicious on certain queries, try one too many and you&#x27;ll hit their dreaded captcha that is impossible to pass.

Back when I was a teenager,I had a book titled &quot;hacking with Google&quot; by Johny long that was basically all specific searching tips and terms (oriented to find open vulnerabilities and the like, but still very useful in general despite the tacky name).<p>I wonder how much of it is still valid after all this time.

Why doesn&#x27;t google.com have a comprehensive list of these? I&#x27;m constantly seeing new ones that I didn&#x27;t know about, but google never teaches you about them so you have to find them in obscure blog posts

Worth pointing out if you do some of these crafted operator searches quite quickly, you&#x27;ll end up getting blocked or having to complete a captcha. I haven&#x27;t done so in a while so I&#x27;m not sure what their current behaviour is.<p>Main reason being there&#x27;s plenty data mining, e.g. looking for &quot;powered by wordpress&quot; and vulnerable versions, and generally all kinds of data mining that involve very specific requests for information, likely queries that aren&#x27;t creating revenue, either.

The - prefix operator is very useful and still works.<p>Google should reinstate the + prefix operator. It was only taken out because it screwed up the search results for Google+, which is dead now.

I love the “inject JS into the page to find stuff” hack. The author mentions local “site you are on” but this can be applied with headless chrome to crawl many sites.

Fun fact: googling for -273.15 without double quotes produces no results.<p>You need to quote negative arithmetic values when searching, even if there are no other query parameters. It made me wonder if I was misremembering absolute zero.

Why is this called &quot;dorking&quot;? &quot;Dorking&quot; is a word that just means using search engines to find very specific data? This seems bizarre to me. Why does this need a special word?<p>Or it actually means using search operators beyond natural language entry? That&#x27;s what this page seems to be about? I don&#x27;t know why that would be called &quot;dorking&quot; either?

A very comprehensive and frequently updated list is here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.exploit-db.com&#x2F;google-hacking-database" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.exploit-db.com&#x2F;google-hacking-database</a>

All I want is the ability to search for symbols. Symbolhound.com is the only site I&#x27;ve heard that will support that, but it leaves a lot to be desired.

Learn to use time. It&#x27;s a drop down.<p>The web is slowly atrophying. Going back in time for originals makes a big difference.<p>Reverse is also true.<p>After a blow up the mass media will repeat the same thing on mass and swamp results.<p>Often an article in the last hour might have what you want, like the database link they are all talking about.

Don&#x27;t you just love it when you&#x27;re carefully crafted search finally displays the words or phrases you want in the snippet on the results page but then when you actually open the link and CTRL+F for it it&#x27;s nowhere to be found? Not even in the raw HTML?<p>I sure do.

There&#x27;s a related thing you can do. If you have web pages somewhere, create a bunch of blank web pages with just one random word on them (something like &quot;ristordshest&quot;) and then create an index page that links to them all.<p>Then link to that index page somewhere where noone except web crawlers will notice it. Then wait a few weeks.<p>Now when you<p>a) sell something on eBay where you are not allowed to link to the product support page page or some other stupid restriction like that<p>b) want to promote something on Instagram where you can&#x27;t link to it<p>Ask people to google for the search term. There will be only one result: Yours.

the &quot;link:&quot; operator doesn&#x27;t work for me--it just seems to include the URL&#x27;s tokens in the search

A few thoughts:<p>1) Great information!<p>2) It seems like the world could use a book like Joe Celko&#x27;s &quot;SQL For Smarties&quot;, but for search engines. Yes, there are such books already, most notably O&#x27;Reilly&#x27;s &quot;Google Hacks&quot; by Rael Dornfest, Paul Bausch, Tara Calishain -- but I think the world could still use a book covering more search engines and search techniques. The above web page would be a great starting point to an endeavor like that.<p>3) &quot;Dorking&quot; (love that term!) -- is going into my 2020 vocabulary lexicon! &lt;g&gt;

Anyone here remember Fravia? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20191201105758&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;search.lores.eu&#x2F;indexo.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20191201105758&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;search.lor...</a>

Is there any way to search the actual page text? I find that often I remember some unique turn of phase from the page that I&#x27;m looking for and it would be extremely helpful to be able to simply search for that.

Does filetype: still work? I&#x27;m getting zero hits for example filetype:epub

I&#x27;m kind of surprised to see Google brought back the + operator. I remember they prominently changed its meaning when they made it the @ of Google+, and I never bothered to check again after it died.

As a teenager, I used to search for &quot;Index Of &lt;movie name&gt;&quot; for movies. 2&#x2F;3 times, I was able to find and download the movie I wanted to watch.

I think I should rename filechef.com to dorkchef now

The email specific queries don&#x27;t appear to work. The &quot;@&quot; is ignored by google so you just get results for the domain string.

This reminds me of an article I once read about the neat tricks that used to exist in altavista.com search engine

Effective Google-foo is one of the first things I teach my first year students. Few greater life skills exist.

NLP and to a lesser extent SEO has vastly diminished the value of this type of searching.

It would be useful to use “Dorking”, even for non-programmers.Good article!

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.nl&#x2F;search?q=site%3A+news.ycombinator.com+lizardmancan" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.nl&#x2F;search?q=site%3A+news.ycombinator.com+...</a><p>i use to use these a lot but now it&#x27;s just useless

Prediction: Using the methods of &quot;dorking&quot;, this is the only page on the internet among 10 million+ results that is calling this &quot;dorking&quot;.