Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

alec.fyi

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 207 posts

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

#31

Post by chris_f »

mehrdadn wrote: post #27
chris_f wrote: post #25

A few corrections: The + (formerly used to force a term to be present in the result) and ~ (also find synonyms) operators have been deprecated. Google now advises to wrap the word in quotes instead of using the +. Google will also automatically look for synonyms without the use of ~. I have seen 'AROUND(n)' mentioned in many other places working as a proximity operator in Google, but I don't believe that is true and…

The plus operator in the page appears to be binary rather than unary. I've never used it. Is that affected as well? (Though I'm confused why AND is necessary. Isn't it implied normally?)

That is correct. AND is added by default and is never necessary in Google.

It's a little confusing because fo how Google implemented some of the operators. The boolean + operator in many cases is used in the same way as AND, but Google originally used it to let users to force a specific word to be present in a search result.

So a search for Fish +Chips was a search for both words, but 'Chips' MUST be present. The equivalent search today is Fish "Chips". It's a little annoying because it requires typing another character, and it it is still not always respected.

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

#32

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

chris_f wrote: post #25

A few corrections: The + (formerly used to force a term to be present in the result) and ~ (also find synonyms) operators have been deprecated. Google now advises to wrap the word in quotes instead of using the +. Google will also automatically look for synonyms without the use of ~. I have seen 'AROUND(n)' mentioned in many other places working as a proximity operator in Google, but I don't believe that is true and…

No longer have Google Chrome on any devices, switched over to Chromium Edge.

Same browser, different overloads.

Left the default search engine as Bing, but only because Duck Duck Go is useless for geographicly local search.

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

#33

Post by abarrettwilsdon »

chris_f wrote: post #25

A few corrections: The + (formerly used to force a term to be present in the result) and ~ (also find synonyms) operators have been deprecated. Google now advises to wrap the word in quotes instead of using the +. Google will also automatically look for synonyms without the use of ~. I have seen 'AROUND(n)' mentioned in many other places working as a proximity operator in Google, but I don't believe that is true and…

Updated the article to reflect and credited you for the contribution!

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

#34

Post by ip_addr »

uniqueid wrote: post #24

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

What search do you prefer and why?

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

#35

Post by mikequinlan »

lizardmancan wrote: post #6

https://www.google.nl/search?q=site%3A+news.ycombinator.com+... i use to use these a lot but now it's just useless

You need to remove the blank after the colon.

https://www.google.nl/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+l...

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

#36

Post by BeeOnRope »

lstamour wrote: post #15
voldacar wrote: post #2

Why doesn't google.com have a comprehensive list of these? I'm constantly seeing new ones that I didn't know about, but google never teaches you about them so you have to find them in obscure blog posts

https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en but it's not complete. My favourite is actually the "range" operator. I don't need it often, but when combined with the exact match quotation marks, it's great. For example, here's a search for Sony bluetooth headphones available on Amazon.ca for between CA$100 and $150: https://www.google.com/search?rls=en&q=site%3Aamazon.ca+%22C... The range operator also wo…

You can use three asterisks in a row, surrounded by whitespace, to get a single asterisk like: "Stocks rose today by * percent".

Oddly, this results in a non-italicized asterisk in the output, contrary to reports in earlier comments that the resulting asterisk would be in italics. There is, however, a zero-length italicized string right before the asterisk in the HTML:

    "Stocks rose today by * percent".

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

#37

Post by fortyseven »

MattGaiser wrote: post #28
uniqueid wrote: post #24

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

What is it you are searching for that the results are useless?

Indeed. This seems like a bit overreacting. Google is lots of things, but a shitty search engine to the point of deserving being blocked is not one of them.

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

#38

Post by beefield »

voldacar wrote: post #2

Why doesn't google.com have a comprehensive list of these? I'm constantly seeing new ones that I didn't know about, but google never teaches you about them so you have to find them in obscure blog posts

> Why doesn't google.com have a comprehensive list of these?

It is quite obvious that google does not give a s&it whether I find what I think I want to find. Google is much more interested in 1) serving me ads they think are most profitable and 2) giving me results they think I want.

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

#39

Post by EE84M3i »

chris_f wrote: post #25

A few corrections: The + (formerly used to force a term to be present in the result) and ~ (also find synonyms) operators have been deprecated. Google now advises to wrap the word in quotes instead of using the +. Google will also automatically look for synonyms without the use of ~. I have seen 'AROUND(n)' mentioned in many other places working as a proximity operator in Google, but I don't believe that is true and…

When you say "deprecated", you mean as in "discontinued" right? Not just like, discouraged?
Post reply on HN