Google dorking/hacking

googledorking contentdiscovery adventofcyber4

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Search engines are using bots, called crawlers to index websites. They go from one page to another, or from one website to another, by following links. The file robots.txt is listing the pages that "good" crawlers shouldn't index, along with the path to a file called sitemap which is literally a map of every page/resource of the websites, allowing crawlers to easily crawl the website.

Most search engines, Google being the most famous one, allow us to make advanced queries. This was known as advanced search, but some authors populazied the term Google Dorking.

👉 For Google, there is the advanced search page to make advanced queries, while you may also directly use special tokens in your search bar. There you can find a long list of Google Search Operators.

📌 See Google Hacking Database for juicy queries to exploit this.

  • site:example.com: search only results on "example.com"
  • site:.com: search only results on ".com" domains
  • cache:example.com: cached versions of "example.com"
  • -word: search results that do not have this word
  • "some word": search results that must have "some word"
  • filetype:pdf: search PDF files
  • intitle:"Hello World": search for websites having "Hello World" in their title
  • intext: (password | passcode): search for a word in the text
  • inurl:admin: search for URLs containing the word "admin"

You may also use

  • imagesize:1920x1080: search only images on "1920 by 1080"
  • @twitter: search results on Twitter
  • $400 or $50..$100: search for a price
  • #hashtag: search for a hashtag
  • xxx OR yyy: search both xxx and yyy

Examples

Subdomains

subdomainenumeration

Find domains/subdomains of example.com

site:example.com site:*.example.com

...