Google Search Tips...

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)