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Popular Google Dork operators

Google's search engine has its own built-in query language. The following list of queries can be run to find a list of files, find information about your competition, track people, get information about SEO backlinks, build email lists, and of course, discover web vulnerabilities.

Let's look at the most popular Google Dorks and what they do.

  • cache: this dork will show you the cached version of any website, e.g. cache:securitytrails.com

  • allintext: searches for specific text contained on any web page, e.g. allintext: hacking tools

  • allintitle: exactly the same as allintext, but will show pages that contain titles with X characters, e.g. allintitle:"Security Companies"

  • allinurl: it can be used to fetch results whose URL contains all the specified characters, e.g: allinurl:clientarea

  • filetype: used to search for any kind of file extensions, for example, if you want to search for pdf files you can use: email security filetype: pdf

  • inurl: this is exactly the same as allinurl, but it is only useful for one single keyword, e.g. inurl:admin

  • intitle: used to search for various keywords inside the title, for example, intitle:security tools will search for titles beginning with "security" but "tools" can be somewhere else in the page.

  • inanchor: this is useful when you need to search for an exact anchor text used on any links, e.g. inanchor:"cyber security"

  • intext: useful to locate pages that contain certain characters or strings inside their text, e.g. intext:"safe internet"

  • site: will show you the full list of all indexed URLs for the specified domain and subdomain, e.g. site:securitytrails.com

  • *: wildcard used to search pages that contain "anything" before your word, e.g. how to * a website, will return "how to…" design/create/hack, etc… "a website".

  • |: this is a logical operator, e.g. "security" "tips" will show all the sites which contain "security" or "tips," or both words.

  • +: used to concatenate words, useful to detect pages that use more than one specific key, e.g. security + trails

  • : minus operator is used to avoiding showing results that contain certain words, e.g. security -trails will show pages that use "security" in their text, but not those that have the word "trails."

If you're looking for the complete set of Google operators, you can follow this SEJ post which covers almost every known dork available today.

source: securitytrails.com