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 haven't found it to work in any logical way.
Also the use of parentheses to nest queries is not necessary in Google. It is actually required for Bing on complicated queries though.
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 :/
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?)
Might be my librarian career bias but I'm always surprised at how few people know about query operators. Ironically as Google search seems to be ignoring vital parts of people's queries, they are becoming more needed now, whereas years ago I would have assumed a constantly improving Google search would get better at determining what I was looking for.
The operators don't work as well as they used to, and even when using them lots of results are still left out or are not an exact match. The combination of the SEO arms race and Google's algorithms to filter "bad" information make it nearly impossible to find some things. Sometimes you are looking for that "bad" piece of info as a counter example rather than a source of truth, and don't need google's patronizing filtering, so would prefer exact string matches. But apparently they know better than you.
You don't even wanna know how many times specialized searches have saved my ass, after multiple years on uni, and working as a writer, journalist, programmer, en even a musician! You can safely say that my entire life revolves around being good at doing various forms of searches.
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.
I've been slowly degoogling myself this year. For ~80% of my search, DDG has been entirely adequate.
I do miss some of Big G's cards, and their Maps is vastly superior to DDG's Apple Maps integration, even despite GMap's advertising. DDG's solution is wild, really: they use Apple for static-image-only maps with no real contextual interface, only a sidebar for search results. If you want directions, you must search for your destination by text alone, then in the sidebar choose to get directions from one of four providers (defaulting to Bing).
But when I just want an engine to match the text I give it (i.e. most of the time), DDG performs at least as well as Google's increasingly-fuzzy matching.
Also weird for me to see the name here (I’m in the next village over), not one you see popping up often. I occasionally wonder how many other HNers there are scattered about in my local area (I suspect not many).
I grew up in Dorking, but this is the first time (that I can remember...) that I actually read its wikipedia article.
TIL: No one knows why 'Dorking' is called 'Dorking', but there's a English Place Names Society which since the 1920's has researched the origins of town names in England, and is considered [0] to be "the established national body on the subject".
Almost due south of Dorking, down the road in Horsham. The small town was the first thing I thought of on seeing this title. I'd imagine this area actually has a fair few HNers, as it's in the tech catchment area for London, Reading, etc.
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 have a different language or use a synonym.
I’m sure search engines consider this somewhat, but explicitly activating such a feature would be a great improvement for the user.
Stackexchange has this feature with tags (using []), with user curated tags. Would be nice to have in DDG or google.
I would just like to create my own groups. As another user said, tagging would probably be gamed by SEO companies, but if people could use their own groupings, that problem wouldn't occur. Their could even be curated lists out there of specific sites that fall within a general category. At the least, I'd like to be able to block sites from ever appearing in my results. I've used add-ons for that which work pretty well, but it should be built-in in my opinion
I'd switch to DDG in a half second if they supported the full query syntax of altavista.digital.com (see http://jkorpela.fi/altavista/ if you've forgotten). Disclaimer: I work for, um, Google.
Do you believe you can get consistent results with any search?
For example, if we pick some uncommon search terms will we get the same results on the first search, the second search, the third, etc. Or will the results change?
I did a search with some terms from one of the comments in this thread, in quotes. The first search returned only one result: this thread.
As I searched the same quoted terms repeatedly along with additional terms, more results were returned that contained the exact string of original terms. Surprised by this, I tried a search with only the original terms, in quotes, once again. This time the search returned more than just the one result.
If it's specific enough, the SERP should stay the same until someone else publishes the same thing
e.g. the search of another article
"set up Google Sheets APIs (and treat Sheets like a database)"
turns up my site and a couple Twitter threads talking about it (plus a phishing site which has scraped and republished it). I presume that will stay the same b/c it's such a specific title phrase (but not because searches are necessarily deterministic)
google removes a shit loads of search results for anything related to torrents or porn, forcing me to go to other search engines that won't either censor or remove content for legal reasons.
Even that list of search engines are reducing now.
Dorking is not that easy to do, Google is very easy on assuming you are being malicious on certain queries, try one too many and you'll hit their dreaded captcha that is impossible to pass.
That really angers me, and I've tripped it more times than I can count, usually by searching for very specific things. Coworkers have also run into it multiple times (before everyone started working from home, we would exclaim "Fuck you, Google!" and raise a middle finger to the screen, which was a cue to everyone else to help).
The fact that they think you're "not human" when you use a search engine for its intended purpose and show how much you know how to use it is both disturbing and saddening. I wonder if Google's own employees run into it and/or the continuing degradation of results, or if they're somehow given immunity and a much better set of results...
Back when I was a teenager,I had a book titled "hacking with Google" by Johny long that was basically all specific searching tips and terms (oriented to find open vulnerabilities and the like, but still very useful in general despite the tacky name).
I wonder how much of it is still valid after all this time.
Back when I was a teenager, I had a slide rule. I can guarantee that a slide rule is still valid, so long as you're not interested in more than two or three significant digits, and you don't want to add or subtract.
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
The range operator also works great with years, dates, though the Tools menu with shortcuts for before: and after: operators can help there too.
One I haven't seen mentioned yet but used to be documented is that you can leave out words in a phrase by replacing them with an asterisk. I'm having trouble not italicizing text in this comment box, so pretend \* means a single asterisk: "Stocks rose today by \* percent" as a search matches the phrase "stocks rose today, led by a 4.4 percent". (Which until this post, had only one result on Google.)
Note that it's not 100% exact matching, because for actually exact matches you have to select "Verbatim" under Tools > All Results in the menu below the search box on the results page.
The only downside to using all these operators is that you'll get very familiar and frustrated with the Google reCAPTCHA prompts as your search is "too precise to be human". Even when signed in to Google, especially often in Safari on an iPhone. Sigh.
Having a reliable search syntax would commoditise Google as other search engines could offer the same options. Having just a search box, instead of lots of options was how they moved ahead of e.g altavista in the first place.
Google would rather people are trained to just type human speak into the search box.
> 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.
One reason they might not have a comprehensive list is because some might be relatively expensive to execute, but they can't/won't disable them for legacy reasons.
At least now we are somewhat more empowered to find obscure blog posts. Which raises the suggestion that hackers are advantaged towards finding information. Which raises the suggestion that we should take the independent initiative of using SEO to inform more people about how to become search super-users.
Worth pointing out if you do some of these crafted operator searches quite quickly, you'll end up getting blocked or having to complete a captcha. I haven't done so in a while so I'm not sure what their current behaviour is.
Main reason being there's plenty data mining, e.g. looking for "powered by wordpress" and vulnerable versions, and generally all kinds of data mining that involve very specific requests for information, likely queries that aren't creating revenue, either.
I love the “inject JS into the page to find stuff” hack. The author mentions local “site you are on” but this can be applied with headless chrome to crawl many sites.
Fun fact: googling for -273.15 without double quotes produces no results.
You need to quote negative arithmetic values when searching, even if there are no other query parameters. It made me wonder if I was misremembering absolute zero.
Why is this called "dorking"? "Dorking" is a word that just means using search engines to find very specific data? This seems bizarre to me. Why does this need a special word?
Or it actually means using search operators beyond natural language entry? That's what this page seems to be about? I don't know why that would be called "dorking" either?
All I want is the ability to search for symbols. Symbolhound.com is the only site I've heard that will support that, but it leaves a lot to be desired.
It’s strange to me that more domain-specific search engines haven’t been created. There must be value in a programmer-specific search engine for instance. Or why aren’t there search engines that specialise in news, social media, Q&A websites or events, to give a few examples.
Wow, I hadn't heard of that. I need that kind of search a couple times a week. It may leave a lot to be desired, but it's like democracy: the worst possible thing of its class, except for all the rest.
Don't you just love it when you're carefully crafted search finally displays the words or phrases you want in the snippet on the results page but then when you actually open the link and CTRL+F for it it's nowhere to be found? Not even in the raw HTML?
There's a related thing you can do. If you have web pages somewhere, create a bunch of blank web pages with just one random word on them (something like "ristordshest") and then create an index page that links to them all.
Then link to that index page somewhere where noone except web crawlers will notice it. Then wait a few weeks.
Now when you
a) sell something on eBay where you are not allowed to link to the product support page page or some other stupid restriction like that
b) want to promote something on Instagram where you can't link to it
Ask people to google for the search term. There will be only one result: Yours.
2) It seems like the world could use a book like Joe Celko's "SQL For Smarties", but for search engines. Yes, there are such books already, most notably O'Reilly's "Google Hacks" by Rael Dornfest, Paul Bausch, Tara Calishain -- but I think the world could still use a book covering more search engines and search techniques. The above web page would be a great starting point to an endeavor like that.
3) "Dorking" (love that term!) -- is going into my 2020 vocabulary lexicon! <g>
Is there any way to search the actual page text? I find that often I remember some unique turn of phase from the page that I'm looking for and it would be extremely helpful to be able to simply search for that.
It still work but some file type never return anything, I have the same problem with epub, pretty sure it's some google's shenanigan about books piracy.
I'm kind of surprised to see Google brought back the + operator. I remember they prominently changed its meaning when they made it the @ of Google+, and I never bothered to check again after it died.
The first two appear to still work, but the third does not.
The permutation searches are tricky because you don't know if a lack of results means the email does not exist, or just hasn't been posted anywhere indexed
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.
chris_f|5 years ago
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 haven't found it to work in any logical way.
Also the use of parentheses to nest queries is not necessary in Google. It is actually required for Bing on complicated queries though.
GordonS|5 years ago
Razengan|5 years ago
Just now I had to give up trying to look up "the term for fans that are paid actors" and variations.
Asking on Reddit or Stack Overflow would be faster than Google's search engine for some things now.
mehrdadn|5 years ago
abarrettwilsdon|5 years ago
EE84M3i|5 years ago
TheSpiceIsLife|5 years ago
Same browser, different overloads.
Left the default search engine as Bing, but only because Duck Duck Go is useless for geographicly local search.
sawaruna|5 years ago
colordrops|5 years ago
kebman|5 years ago
uniqueid|5 years ago
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.
joe-collins|5 years ago
I do miss some of Big G's cards, and their Maps is vastly superior to DDG's Apple Maps integration, even despite GMap's advertising. DDG's solution is wild, really: they use Apple for static-image-only maps with no real contextual interface, only a sidebar for search results. If you want directions, you must search for your destination by text alone, then in the sidebar choose to get directions from one of four providers (defaulting to Bing).
But when I just want an engine to match the text I give it (i.e. most of the time), DDG performs at least as well as Google's increasingly-fuzzy matching.
darepublic|5 years ago
MattGaiser|5 years ago
ip_addr|5 years ago
neilduncan|5 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorking
aidos|5 years ago
tomalpha|5 years ago
TIL: No one knows why 'Dorking' is called 'Dorking', but there's a English Place Names Society which since the 1920's has researched the origins of town names in England, and is considered [0] to be "the established national body on the subject".
[0] https://epns.nottingham.ac.uk/
zeristor|5 years ago
My Dad worked for Mullard, which was renamed to Philips Electronics and relocated to Dorking.
kolektiv|5 years ago
chrisb|5 years ago
mbrookes|5 years ago
Perhaps a mini meet-up is in order? :)
tutfbhuf|5 years ago
weisbaum|5 years ago
Ahrefs has a pretty comprehensive list here: https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators/
harha|5 years ago
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 have a different language or use a synonym.
I’m sure search engines consider this somewhat, but explicitly activating such a feature would be a great improvement for the user.
Stackexchange has this feature with tags (using []), with user curated tags. Would be nice to have in DDG or google.
mitchdoogle|5 years ago
epanchin|5 years ago
Shared404|5 years ago
https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sy...
kps|5 years ago
surround|5 years ago
https://www.exploit-db.com/google-hacking-database
1vuio0pswjnm7|5 years ago
Do you believe you can get consistent results with any search?
For example, if we pick some uncommon search terms will we get the same results on the first search, the second search, the third, etc. Or will the results change?
I did a search with some terms from one of the comments in this thread, in quotes. The first search returned only one result: this thread.
As I searched the same quoted terms repeatedly along with additional terms, more results were returned that contained the exact string of original terms. Surprised by this, I tried a search with only the original terms, in quotes, once again. This time the search returned more than just the one result.
abarrettwilsdon|5 years ago
e.g. the search of another article "set up Google Sheets APIs (and treat Sheets like a database)"
turns up my site and a couple Twitter threads talking about it (plus a phishing site which has scraped and republished it). I presume that will stay the same b/c it's such a specific title phrase (but not because searches are necessarily deterministic)
minusSeven|5 years ago
Even that list of search engines are reducing now.
yuvadam|5 years ago
userbinator|5 years ago
The fact that they think you're "not human" when you use a search engine for its intended purpose and show how much you know how to use it is both disturbing and saddening. I wonder if Google's own employees run into it and/or the continuing degradation of results, or if they're somehow given immunity and a much better set of results...
kace91|5 years ago
I wonder how much of it is still valid after all this time.
mcswell|5 years ago
Mandatum|5 years ago
voldacar|5 years ago
lstamour|5 years ago
The range operator also works great with years, dates, though the Tools menu with shortcuts for before: and after: operators can help there too.
One I haven't seen mentioned yet but used to be documented is that you can leave out words in a phrase by replacing them with an asterisk. I'm having trouble not italicizing text in this comment box, so pretend \* means a single asterisk: "Stocks rose today by \* percent" as a search matches the phrase "stocks rose today, led by a 4.4 percent". (Which until this post, had only one result on Google.)
Note that it's not 100% exact matching, because for actually exact matches you have to select "Verbatim" under Tools > All Results in the menu below the search box on the results page.
The only downside to using all these operators is that you'll get very familiar and frustrated with the Google reCAPTCHA prompts as your search is "too precise to be human". Even when signed in to Google, especially often in Safari on an iPhone. Sigh.
vezycash|5 years ago
Related:examplesite.com used to work well. Now, it's better to use sites like alternativeto.net.
~phrase is unnecessary because but google searches for synonyms by default
phrase1 + phrase2 - Google randomly ignores it. I use it this way +compulsoryTerm
Although rare, there are things I simply can't find using Google. But Bing would. If Google keeps it up, other search engines would benefit.
beachy|5 years ago
Google would rather people are trained to just type human speak into the search box.
beefield|5 years ago
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.
KorfmannArno|5 years ago
unknown|5 years ago
[deleted]
EE84M3i|5 years ago
mrnuclear|5 years ago
ricardo81|5 years ago
Main reason being there's plenty data mining, e.g. looking for "powered by wordpress" and vulnerable versions, and generally all kinds of data mining that involve very specific requests for information, likely queries that aren't creating revenue, either.
w0mbat|5 years ago
Google should reinstate the + prefix operator. It was only taken out because it screwed up the search results for Google+, which is dead now.
kilroy123|5 years ago
marcrosoft|5 years ago
flywheel|5 years ago
yourad_io|5 years ago
You need to quote negative arithmetic values when searching, even if there are no other query parameters. It made me wonder if I was misremembering absolute zero.
yjftsjthsd-h|5 years ago
jrochkind1|5 years ago
Or it actually means using search operators beyond natural language entry? That's what this page seems to be about? I don't know why that would be called "dorking" either?
p410n3|5 years ago
https://youtu.be/N3dzVl40lQA
indit|5 years ago
the_jeremy|5 years ago
Brakenshire|5 years ago
mcswell|5 years ago
aaron695|5 years ago
The web is slowly atrophying. Going back in time for originals makes a big difference.
Reverse is also true.
After a blow up the mass media will repeat the same thing on mass and swamp results.
Often an article in the last hour might have what you want, like the database link they are all talking about.
huffmsa|5 years ago
I sure do.
Tepix|5 years ago
Then link to that index page somewhere where noone except web crawlers will notice it. Then wait a few weeks.
Now when you
a) sell something on eBay where you are not allowed to link to the product support page page or some other stupid restriction like that
b) want to promote something on Instagram where you can't link to it
Ask people to google for the search term. There will be only one result: Yours.
bmay|5 years ago
snowwrestler|5 years ago
abarrettwilsdon|5 years ago
You can more or less replicate the functionality with intext:specific.url/subsite
Will update and credit you.
peter_d_sherman|5 years ago
1) Great information!
2) It seems like the world could use a book like Joe Celko's "SQL For Smarties", but for search engines. Yes, there are such books already, most notably O'Reilly's "Google Hacks" by Rael Dornfest, Paul Bausch, Tara Calishain -- but I think the world could still use a book covering more search engines and search techniques. The above web page would be a great starting point to an endeavor like that.
3) "Dorking" (love that term!) -- is going into my 2020 vocabulary lexicon! <g>
kobieyc|5 years ago
bmn__|5 years ago
harimau777|5 years ago
abarrettwilsdon|5 years ago
generally "phrase" works well too
jhbadger|5 years ago
choo-t|5 years ago
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35287?hl=en
FrankSansC|5 years ago
chc|5 years ago
unknown|5 years ago
[deleted]
buffin|5 years ago
zhacker|5 years ago
iandanforth|5 years ago
abarrettwilsdon|5 years ago
The permutation searches are tricky because you don't know if a lack of results means the email does not exist, or just hasn't been posted anywhere indexed
Will update and credit
j45|5 years ago
Daub|5 years ago
malwarebytess|5 years ago
somerandomboi|5 years ago
lizardmancan|5 years ago
i use to use these a lot but now it's just useless
mikequinlan|5 years ago
https://www.google.nl/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+l...
abarrettwilsdon|5 years ago
(also: you'll want to remove the space between site: and news.ycombinator.com)
flywheel|5 years ago
montjoy|5 years ago
wglb|5 years ago