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

alec.fyi

71–80 of 207 posts

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

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whoever the first developer was that used "deprecated" got it kind of wrong, the word should have been "depreciated". Deprecate: "express disapproval of." Depreciate: "diminish in value over a period of time." I kind of cringe when other developers say "deprecated". Edit: Versioning and not removing APIs is kind of the way to go, so you don't break client apps that possibly can't be updated easily or at all. "Depreci…

Nope. It is deprecated -- it's use is disapproved of, you should stop using it. In the future it will go away but for now it works, so you can use it, but its use is discouraged. Depreciated doesn't make any sense -- the value of the deprecated API does not diminish over time. It works, until it stops working. It's on or off. It doesn't work less and less every month or anything. It currently still works completely,…

Yeah, nope yourself. It seems like a lot of people aren't really thinking this through very much.

And that is absolutely the wrong way to approach API development. An API that is being sun-setted should never be removed, because older clients could still use it but sometimes can't be upgraded to newer clients. Removing a v1 API breaks those clients and it's a shitty thing to do to users. Yeah, people should be building NEW things with it, but there's no reason to look at the v1 API with "disgust" as "deprecated" implies - It's simply an older version that should remain functional, if your system is worth half a shit. AWS doesn't terminate older API versions, they just create new versions. Or you can be like Facebook and "deprecate" stuff and just shut it down before your official shutdown date, or not give any notice at all - that's REALLY a fun culture to work in, I guess, for them. "deprecated" is a really negative word, and doesn't even really translate to anything good in terms of software development. It's my opinion that "depreciated" is a far better word and far better outcome when used in software development instead of "deprecated". YMMV.

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

#72
post #66

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/specific term. 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 h…

Businesses don’t game stackexchange.

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

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

    > a shitty search engine to the point of 
    > deserving being blocked is not one of them.
Google's search quality isn't why I blocked Google. I've wanted to block Google for over half a decade, but the excellence of their search stopped me. That stopped being an issue this year.

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

#74

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

I hope it doesn’t catch on since it makes me die a little inside. It’s a very Reddit-type word though. I can easily imagine it being used by non-technical folk and tech journalists.

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

#75
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…

Worth mentioning that even if you put a term in double quotes, Google still tries to be too clever - you are not guaranteed to get results that contain your quotes search term :/

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

#77
post #67
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it’s given as a warning then yes, e.g. the dplyr package in R sometimes outputs “feature xyz is deprecated and will be removed in version x.x”. Often though it’s used when the feature is already removed, i.e., it’s not only best practice not to use it, but also impossible with that version.

In this case, depreciated is incorrect. Removal has already happened, the "period of time" is already over.

Removing APIs is not a great practice though. Look at AWS, they version their APIs, they don't just remove them, and removing them should be unnecessary if your underlying tech isn't brittle and badly written. "Depreciated" is a far better term to use, with a far better outcome in my opinion. Companies that remove old versions of APIs and break existing client apps (that possibly can't be udpated) really suck.

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

#78

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 .

Google still good for coding related searches

Depends on what coding-related search, I think. Searching for C is useless unless you know to search for clang, for example; but then you get results for the compiler. If you're trying to search for lesser known languages with short names or names that overlap with common words, then forget it! (Arguably that's a fault of the language, but arguably arguably you shouldn't have to choose what to name your creation based on Google.)

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

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

> 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".

Sounds like the matching is something like

    /\
or maybe

    /\
rather than

    /\
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