The purpose of a search engine is to search available webservers which serve content for anyone to find with the right words. However, what if I told you that you can get fancy with a search engine, from looking at a specific site to even finding raw files?
This is where Google-fu comes in. Google-fu, or Google Dorking, refers to write in advance operations on a search engine yielding results catered to your specifics. No, it’s not about finding and identifying dorks, ya dork. It’s about writing detailed search queries in order to get the data that you want.
The art of Google-fu is used by hackers and crackers to gather information on a website. Usually they write a program where it uses Google, or any search engine, to pull and parse the data. With the data in hand and a good pair of eyes, they can spot weaknesses in a webserver, such as a file or sensitive information that was not supposed to be in public.
I will show you some examples of this using Google. Supposed we want to search about a specific celebrity, say Megan Fox, here’s what it looks like if you simply type “Megan Fox” on the search bar:
Now let’s say you want to know the latest juicy gossip about her, but you want to make sure the source comes from TMZ. We can do that with the operand “inurl”.
Pretty handy, isn’t it? Naturally this is but a sample taste. Usually search engines comes with their own set of search operations of which you can redundantly search them out depending on which search engine you use.
Another example is searching for filetypes. Say you want to find a public studies about black holes, but you want PDF files for offline reading. Here is how it’s done:
We’ll leave it at that. As with any new skill, I urge you to practice different types of queries using these operations. Of course, since there are a lot of operations to choose from, I will leave a list here authored by Joshua Hardwick. And as always…
HACK TO THE FUTURE!
