How to talk with a Google search robot (and some others) and increase the relevance and effectiveness of your search.
The problem of the bias of search algorithms has been discussed for several years. The issuance in the main search engines over the years is becoming less and less relevant, clogged with advertising and overseptimized pages. And with the introduction of AI, there is also a risk of hallucinations. In this situation, the so -called “search operators” and the requests - Google Dorks will help to increase the relevance of search results.
Google search operators are a lot (by link You can familiarize yourself with the full list), but the fundamental ones, those that the factory and riser are used in daily work, are only a few.
Basic operators
- Site: This operator is used to restrict the search results that relate exclusively to the specified domain or site. For example,
Site: Example.comwill return the pages of only this site. This is a good way to explore the site with tens of thousands of pages. - Filetype: Allows you to search for files of a certain type. This can be useful for finding documents, tables, presentations and other files, for example,
Filetype: PDFFind PDF files, aFiletype: XLS- tables. This operator helps to look for information in databases, including - hidden from an external user. - Inurl: Looking for words that should be in the URL web page. This request can be used to search for directory or specific files on the server, for example,
Inurl: admin. - intitle: Finds pages whose headlines contain certain words, which is useful for finding specific topics or documents, for example,
Intitle: "Confidential Information". - Intext: Allows you to find pages containing certain words in the text. This can help identify pages that mention specific information, for example,
Intext: "Secret data". It is not coincidence that quotes-varnishes-they help to look for an accurate phrase.
At the same time, all operators can be combined as part of one request. Suppose that we need data on maternal mortality in Russia, we should look for them on the Rosstat website. Search query may look like this:
"Maternal mortality ratio" Site: rosstat.gov.ru Filetype: XLS
In addition, you can limit the time search: everything once appeared on the Internet for the first time. You can find an example of use in article Factschors from Kazakhstan or in our research Stories about the concept of "Ubuntu".
Having mastered the basic operators, you will greatly simplify the search process in Google and DucDuckgo, and will receive more accurate results with less effort.
There is no need to memorize the entire list of operators. Expert in the investigations on open sources Henk van Ess launched DORK CARRISE generator. Understanding how basic operators work, you can easily use this tool.
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