Below discussed are various Google’s special commands and I shall be explaining each command in brief and will show how it can be used for critical information digging.
[
intitle: ]
The “
intitle:” syntax helps Google restrict the search results to pages containing that word in the title. For example, “
intitle: login
password” (without quotes) will return links to those pages that has the word "
login" in their title, and the word "
password" anywhere in the page.
Similarly, if one has to query for more than one word in the page title then in that case “
allintitle:” can be used instead of “
intitle” to get the list of pages containing all those words in its title. For example using “
intitle:
login intitle:
password” is same as querying “
allintitle:
login password”.
[
inurl: ]
The “
inurl:” syntax restricts the search results to those URLs containing the search keyword. For example: “
inurl:
passwd” (without quotes) will return only links to those pages that have "
passwd" in the URL.
Similarly, if one has to query for more than one word in an URL then in that case “
allinurl:” can be used instead of “
inurl” to get the list of URLs containing all those search keywords in it. For example: “
allinurl:
etc/passwd“ will look for the URLs containing “
etc” and “
passwd”. The slash (“/”) between the words will be ignored by Google.
[
site: ]
The “
site:” syntax restricts Google to query for certain keywords in a particular site or domain. For example: “
exploits site:
hackingspirits.com” (without quotes) will look for the keyword “
exploits” in those pages present in all the links of the domain “
hackingspirits.com”. There should not be any space between “
site:” and the “
domain name”.
[
filetype: ]
This “
filetype:” syntax restricts Google search for files on internet with particular extensions (i.e. doc, pdf or ppt etc). For example: “
filetype:
doc site:
gov confidential” (without quotes) will look for files with “.
doc” extension in all government domains with “.
gov” extension and containing the word “
confidential” either in the pages or in the “.
doc” file. i.e. the result will contain the links to all confidential word document files on the government sites.
[
link: ]
“
link:” syntax will list down webpages that have links to the specified webpage. For Example: “
link:
www.securityfocus.com” will list webpages that have links pointing to the SecurityFocus homepage. Note there can be no space between the "
link:" and the web page url.
[
related: ]
The “
related:” will list web pages that are "
similar" to a specified web page. For Example: “
related:
www.securityfocus.com” will list web pages that are similar to the Securityfocus homepage. Note there can be no space between the "
related:" and the web page url.
[
cache: ]
The query “
cache:” will show the version of the web page that Google has in its cache. For Example: “
cache:
www.hackingspirits.com” will show Google's cache of the Google homepage. Note there can be no space between the "
cache:" and the web page url.
If you include other words in the query, Google will highlight those words within the cached document. For Example: “
cache:
www.hackingspirits.com guest” will show the cached content with the word "
guest" highlighted.
[
intext: ]
The “
intext:” syntax searches for words in a particular website. It ignores links or URLs and page titles. For example: “
intext:
exploits” (without quotes) will return only links to those web pages that has the search keyword "
exploits" in its webpage.
[
phonebook: ]
“
phonebook” searches for U.S. street address and phone number information. For Example: “
phonebook:
Lisa+CA” will list down all names of person having “
Lisa” in their names and located in “
California (CA)”. This can be used as a great tool for hackers incase someone want to do dig personal information for social engineering.