Quick and Easy Google Hacking

It sounds illegal and can be, but if used the right way, it can give you more accurate search results. That means fewer results to go through before finding what you are actually looking for. It’s time to get your Google-Fu on (or learn to use Google correctly if you’re not a geek!).

Google provides ‘operators’ which are keywords that help us get more precise information from our searches.

Example: We want to find info about Bill Gates on the microsoft.com website, your usual search would be:

Bill Gates Microsoft

This search would return thousands of results and not all of them would be from the microsoft.com website.

If we used Google operators, we could narrow our search to know where we would like to find the info from. In this case, we would use the site: operator, this would make Google search only that particular site, this is what we would enter into the Google Search -

site:microsoft.com Bill Gates

You will notice that your results have been drastically reduced (in a good way!) and they are all from the microsoft.com website which was what you were originally searching for.

Other useful operators include allintitle: or intitle: these operators will return all the keywords in the web page title or pages with at least one keyword in the title.

allintitle:Ascension Island or intitle:Ascension Island

Try it and see the difference!

Another very useful operator is filetype: this would allow you to search for specific files i.e. pdf, docx, etc.

filetype:docx

would return every docx file available on the internet

site:microsoft.com filetype:docx

would return all docx files on the microsoft.com website

There are many more operators you can use for a better search experience and they can be found at: http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&p=adv_operators&answer=136861

All Search Engines have similar operators, so if you are a fan of Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask or another engine, there will be operators available to help improve your search.