What is Google Dorking?

Google Dorking is an advance search technique, which can find information about anything and everything from the darkest and the deepest corners of the Internet.

Google being the most used search engine, these techniques come-in handy to do Open Source Intelligence about your targets including POI (Point of Interest), SOI (Subject of Interest), EOI (Entity of Interest), or NFI (Need for Information).

Almost every Search Engine including Brave Search, DuckDuckGo, Startpage etc. support advance search operators. But the Google search have the most extensive support.

Advance Search Operators

Following advance search operators can be used on almost all major search engines^{1 2 3 4}.

Switch to Verbatim Mode

If you search for a particular model of a laptop battery on Google search, it will not only include that model’s battery but batteries for other models too.

To instruct Google to search only for specific terms given in the search box and avoid showing unnecessary results switch to verbatim mode.

Click on Tools button on the top of a search page, and switch All results to Verbatim.

While using advance search operators, keep it on verbatim mode to get more accurate and precise results.

The " " operator

The quotes operator lets you search for the specific word inside the quotes only, regardless of its spelling.

If you add other words beside the quoted word, google search must include quoted word in the results beside the other search terms.

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How to spell "mispell" in American English?

To get more specific results you quote the whole string, and the individual words inside the string too.

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"How to spell "mispell" in American English?"

It’s a bad example, as it may not return any results, but conveys the point well.

The + and - operators

The + operator returns web pages containing the specified term either in the title or the body of the page.

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The Office +'tv series'

It will search for pages that feature the term The Office referring to the TV series, not the Microsoft Office products.

To search the term The Office, we can exclude the web pages containing Microsoft in the title or the body of the page by using - operator.

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The Office -microsoft

Using these operators, we can include or exclude specified words from title or body of the corresponding webpages.

The site: operator

It helps you include or exclude searches from specific websites.

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Why iPhones are Sh*t! site:reddit.com

To exclude a site from the results

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Why iPhones are Sh*t! -site:reddit.com

The -site: operator will exclude the website mentioned after it. To include a website in the search results, you can use + operator like this +site:, but it’s definitely redundant.

To search on top-level domain only:

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How to boil an egg? site:gov

To get results from all the subdomains of a particular top-level domain:

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How to file tax returns? site:*.gov.pk

The inurl: and allinurl: operators

If you want to search something specifically, inside the URLs of the particular website only. It can be paired with site: operator to only include/exclude inURL searches from that particular website.

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site:microsoft.com -inurl:https

This will look for http pages on microsoft.com including its subdomains.

The allinurl: operator search for pages with multiple words in the URL.

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allinurl:microsoft copilot

It will include results, which contain both Microsoft and copilot in their URL.

The intitle: and allintitle operators

To show only the results which have a single specified word in the title of the page and rest of the words anywhere:

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intitle:max hard disk capacity

It will only look for max in the page title, while rest of the terms anywhere on the webpages.

To search for multiple terms in the title:

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allintitle:hard disk capacity minimum

The allintitle: operator basically matches the terms like OR operator, if any of the mentioned terms have no results, they will still show if there are any results for the other mentioned terms.

If you want to search for pages whose titles contain all the searched words use allintitle:. If you want pages whose title contains first word only and others anywhere in the search result use intitle:.

The * wildcard operator

Asterisk acts as a wildcard, as a placeholder for one or more word (Accor. to Thio Joe⁵, It can hold 5 words). If you search for:

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"how to make * at home"

Here * may act as a placeholder for pizza, candles etc.

The filetype: operator

We can search for specific file types:

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OSINT technique filetype:pdf

OR

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OSINT technique ext:pdf

The AROUND n operator

n = Number of words to look AROUND

This operator returns the results for the left and right terms to specified numbers of words in between.

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"brain" AROUND 20 "first computer virus"

This will look for the results which include word brain and first computer virus within 20 words apart.

If you put AROUND 0, it means putting the left and right terms together without any word spacing.

The AND and OR/| operators

If I search:

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Cat Eggs

Google will try to look for the results containing both of these terms together.

But If I use OR operator between the two words, Google will show separate results for both Cat and Eggs terms.

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Cat OR Eggs

OR

Cat | Eggs

If you use AND operator:

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Cat AND Eggs

It pretty much shows the same results if you use both of these words together without any advance search operator.

The before: and after: operators

Search for results from before a specific date:

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Pakistan atomic program before:1998-05-28

It will show all the results from before 28 may 1998.

To get results after a specific year or date before:yyyy-mm-dd:

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Pakistan Privacy laws after:2022

The loc operator

Find results from a specified location.

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loc:karachi Taj Mahal Hotel 

Brave Search Operators

Brave Search support many of the above-mentioned search operators.

But it also supports some extra operators⁶. I tested these on Google Search, but most of them either don’t work at all or don’t function as smoothly as they do in Brave Search.

The support for search operators is currently experimental in the Brave Search⁶.

The inbody: operator

It returns webpages containing the specified term in the body of the page.

Let’s search:

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DuckDuckGo inbody:"search operator"

The inpage: operator

It outputs webpages containing the specified term either in the title or in the body of the page.

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inpage:"DuckDuckGo search operators"

It will only show the results where all these words are either present in the title or in the body of the page it displays. Likewise, it doesn’t matter if they appear together or scattered throughout the webpage.

The lang: or language: operator

If you want to search for pages in the language of your choice. The language code must be in the ISO 639-1, English as en, Urdu as ur and Arabic as ar.

The loc: or location: operator

It returns webpages from the specified country or region. The country code must be in ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 format.

The NOT operator

Brave Search support AND and OR logical operators. But NOT operator is a unique search operator supported only by Brave Search.

According to help page, you can use it like:

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brave search NOT site:brave.com

It will exclude all the brave.com subdomains too.

brave search -site:brave.com

The !bang support

You can directly search on websites from your Brave search homepage using !bangs⁷

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!yt systemd is evil!

You will be directed to YouTube page with search results for term systemd is evil! 🙂.

DuckDuckGo Advance Search Syntax

DDG supports many of the advance search operators. But it offers some unique search syntax⁸ of its own too.

The filetype: operator

It supports only PDF, doc(x), xlx(x), ppt(x), HTML filetypes.

The ~ operator

The DDG help pages⁸ read:

Example: ~"cats and dogs"

Experimental syntax: more results that are semantically similar to “cats and dogs”, like “cats & dogs” and “dogs and cats” in addition to “cats and dogs”.

During my test, I got similar hits for ~"cats and dogs", +"cats and dogs", "cats and dogs" and cats and dogs.

The \ and !bang operators

Using this, DuckDuckGo will directly open the first result for the search term.

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\python

DDG supports bangs operators originally. Brave Search adopted their specification later.

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!g Hello World!

It will open the Hello World! search term directly on Google Search.

Safe Search

Using !safeon or !safeoff beside their search terms, one can directly turn on/off the safe search.