When provided with a target, the first place I will go is Google.com. The first search I will perform will be the target’s name. That’s it, no advanced operators or any additional information. I will type in the target and see where that initial search takes me. I will then follow my Google search with a search on Bing.com. These two search engines are by far the most popular search engines here in the United States and most researchers will start their journey utilizing either Google or Bing. This article will go into detail about advanced ways to utilize these two search engines. If you happened to read my previous article – Google Hacking for Beginners – you already have a basic understanding of a few advanced operators that you can use to your advantage during a Google search, this article will further expand your knowledge.

Quotation Marks

At this point, go ahead and navigate to Google.com and type in your name and perform the search. How many search results appeared? Now, place your name inside of quotation marks and perform the search. How many search results appeared? When performing this on myself, my search results went from over 9,000 to 368. By placing your target’s name inside of quotation marks, you will significantly improve your search results. When you performed that initial search (without quotation marks) the pages that were returned did not necessarily have your first and last name right next to each other. Your first name could have been next to another person’s name, for example. But, when performing the second search (with quotation marks) the pages that are returned will contain the words next to each other. Placing quotes around any search terms tells Google to search exactly what you tell it to.

Google Search Tools

There is a text bar at the top of the Google search result page. This allows for searching the current search terms within other Google services such as Images, Maps, Videos, etc. There is also an option for “Search Tools”. Clicking this option will present a new row of options directly below. This will give you new filters to help you focus only on the desired results. The filters will vary for each type of Google search. Here are some examples of different options you can use to enhance your search:

–          Any time – This will allow you to choose the time range of visible search results. The default is set to “Any time” which will not filter any results.

–          Past Hour – Will only display results that have been indexed within the last hour.

–          Past 24 hours – Will only display results that have been indexed within the last 24 hours.

–          Past Week – Will only display results that have been indexed within the last week.

–          Past Month – Will only display results that have been indexed within the last month.

–          Past Year – Will only display results that have been indexed within the last year.

–          Custom Range – This will present a popup window that will allow you to specify the exact range of dates that you want searched. This can be helpful when you want to analyze online content posted within a known time.

Google Alerts

When you have exhausted the search engines looking for your target, you will want to know if new content is posted. Checking Google results every day or week to see if anything new is out there can get tiresome. Utilizing Google Alerts will put Google to work on locating new information and will then send you an email daily as it finds new websites that mention your target of choice.

This can be accomplished by logging into any Google service, such as Gmail, and create a new Google Alert and specifying the search term, delivery options, and email address that you want new information sent to.

Google Custom Search Engines

Google custom search engines are an awesome tool that you should utilize to your advantage. Google allows you to specify the exact type of searches that you want to conduct, and then create an individual search engine for your specific needs. Many specialty websites that claim to search only social network content are simply using a custom search engine from Google. So how do you go about creating your very own custom search engine through Google?

The first step is to log into a Google account and navigate to the following: google.com/cse. If you have never created an engine, you will be prompted to create your first. Enter the first website that you want to search. As you enter the website to search, Google will automatically create another field to enter an additional website. Once you have selected the websites that you want to search, provide a name for your custom engine and select “Create”. You now have a custom search engine.

Bing

Though I do tend to use Google as my first option, Bing.com is a close second and I like to use both during all engagements. Bing is Microsoft’s competition to Google and many of the same tactics that can be used for Google, can also be used for Bing. One thing that I do really like about Bing is the “LinkFromDomain” search. An example of this would be: “LinkFromDomain:thesocialengineer.com”. This operator creates a result that includes every website that I have a link to on any of the pages within my website. This is different than the “link” operator that Google uses because Google provides any website that links to the target site. So the “LinkFromDomain” is the opposite and to my knowledge, is the only search engine that offers this service.

Why is this so useful? When a target’s website is discovered, this site can be large and contain hundreds of pages, entries, etc. While clicking through all of these is possible, sometimes links are hidden and cannot be seen visually looking at the pages. This operator allows Bing to pull links out of the actual code of the website. How cool is that?

Bing vs Google

Everybody has their own preferences when it comes to their go-to search engine. Most people will tend to side with Google, and personally, I am one of those individuals. But I do like Bing a lot and I do like certain features of Bing more than Google. During an engagement, I will no doubt use both of these search engines. A search for the exact same term on Google and Bing will provide you with different search results and it is a great disservice to you and your client if you are only using one of these search engines.

Article Written By: Chad Gutschenritter

Article based off:  Michael Bazzell’s Open Source Intelligence Techniques (4th Edition)