lonecity.com

The other day I was stumbling around on the web, and I saw something that caught my attention.  Of course bieng the forgetfull dumbass I am I didn’t bother to bookmark it.  So last night when I wanted to go back and look into it further I found myself searching google to find it.  I’ve been using the internet and google for so many years now that I just instinctively found myself keying in syntax strings in the search bar to find what I need quickly.  In a brief moment of inspiration I realized that’s probably not something a normal user would do.  Then it made me think about what else I can do with google’s search bar.

The particular sytntax I am referring to is the “site:” command.  It just happened that I knew what website the information I was looking for was on, but I didn’t know exactly where on that site to find it.  The “site:” command lets you use google to search for results only from one website.  While I am sure it is well documented, I discovered it when using googles webmaster tools to see if my website was indexed. 

The other commands I’ve picked up over the years are “link:” and “define:”  I’m not entirely sure where I picked up the latter one but I use it all the time because it is much faster than looking for a dictionary.  I can pull up what I want to know on google faster than I can find a bookmark to an online dictionary.  This is especially true if what I’m after is how to spell something.  Not to imply that I bother correcting my spelling very often…

So to get on with my story I got the idea to research and find out just what else can be done with the google search bar.  Here’s what I discovered:

• intitle: If you add this to a keyword in your search it will find web pages that have what you are searching for in the title of the page.
• inurl: This will find results that are are an exact match for something in the url (link) So if you were looking for the keyword legal, you could search “inurl:legal” and find pages that have the word legal in the filename
• filetype: This is an interesting one.  If you are looking for photos you could try something like filetype:jpg or you could try filetype:pdf if you know what you are looking for is in an adobe brochure format.
• + an -: I knew about these already but I hadn’t really thought about them with respect to google.  If you use them in conjuction with some of the other strings it can become very powerful.  For example there is a particular site that always seems to pop up when I am searching for hardware info or drivers.  The site doesn’t have any valuable content but they make you register just to find that out.  It burns my butt every time they pop up at #1 for something I search.  A simple change to my search string “-site:experts-exchange.com” will keep all their pages from my results list. (amen) 
• intext:  Finds results that are in the text of the page.  If you use this with a quote you can find pages that are either the source of the quote or about the quote.  Intext:plurbus intext:unum would bring up results about the quote “e plurbus unum” which is printed on most (all?) USA currency.
• allintext: allinurl: allintitle: are the same as the intext: inurl: and intitle: except that they are for the entire search string instead of just one word.
• inanchor: finds keywords in the anchor text of links and images.

There are litterally dozens of others and probably millions of creative uses for these simple string filters.  One thing I came across researching these was a guy who demonstrated how to use these tags to find good available domain names.  (probably doesn’t work anymore because as soon as someone releases a trick like that it gets used to death…)  Anyhow, it used the intitle tag to search through massive lists of old expiring domain name auctions.  He would find lists of names with good keywords.  Then the lists were fed through some filtering and checked for availability.   In just seconds his little trick could come up with thousands of expired domains that didn’t get re-registered.  You probably won’t find any natural trafic gems this way as great names are always picked up on the drop, but if you are looking for a good name to develop there is potential.

Another interesting thing I came across is how to use google to find mp3’s.  Using the search string intitle:”index of” will find directorys of files.  Mix that with filetype:mp3 and you have a quick google search that finds open directories of mp3 files. 

Of course with good also comes the bad.  The less scrupulous types will use these same tricks to search the web for sites that have known vulnerabilities.  If you have a website that uses script that is vulnerable you can just about bet that google is telling some turd how to deface it right now.