Google Hacks

From Free net encyclopedia

Image:Google Hacks.jpg Google Hacks: Tips & Tools for Smarter Searching (ISBN 0-596-00447-8) is a book of tips about Google, a popular Internet search engine, by Tara Calishain and Rael Dornfest. The book was published by O'Reilly in February 2003. It covers tips of all kinds, from usage hints for the novice just using Google, to advice for the expert programming the Google Web API. Most programming examples are written in Perl.

The second edition was published in December, 2004 (ISBN 0-596-00857-0).

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Google Hacking

Google Hacking is the 'art' of using Google.com's ability to recall mass amounts of data, to enter directories, find 'secrets' of the web and even attain personal, revealing or illegal information, such as passwords. Using Google's language for detailed searching, including characters like "+", "." and "/".

The power of Google to expose loops and holes in websites was very much publicised by the 'hacker' Johnny Long, mostly know by his alias "j0hnny". He published his wisdom and knowledge through books, and his very own website, http://johnny.ihackstuff.com/.

The response to malicious search tactics has been headed by the Google Hack Honeypot, which applies honeypot concepts to the search engine index for the information security community.

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Basics

What defines a normal 'search' on Google from a hack is the insertion of special characters of processes.

e.g: intitle:Wikipedia

Typing the above into a Google searchbar and clicking enter would produce results that have the word 'Wikipedia' in the title (inserted via the <title> code in html) which appear in the top of a browser.

Words can also be excluded from a search, thus making sure they do not appear in any result.

e.g: intitle:wikipedia -house

The "-house" statement bars any result with "house" in it. Therefore, the word "house" would not appear in any result.

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