[HN Gopher] Dorking: the use of search engines to find very spec...
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Dorking: the use of search engines to find very specific data
Author : abarrettwilsdon
Score : 253 points
Date : 2020-08-09 18:52 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.alec.fyi)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.alec.fyi)
| bmay wrote:
| the "link:" operator doesn't work for me--it just seems to
| include the URL's tokens in the search
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Pretty sure that one is deprecated. It was very useful for SEO
| research, which is probably why it doesn't work anymore.
| harimau777 wrote:
| Is there any way to search the actual page text? I find that
| often I remember some unique turn of phase from the page that I'm
| looking for and it would be extremely helpful to be able to
| simply search for that.
| abarrettwilsdon wrote:
| `intext:phrase` and `allintext:multi part phrase`
|
| generally "phrase" works well too
| harimau777 wrote:
| Thank you!
| ricardo81 wrote:
| Worth pointing out if you do some of these crafted operator
| searches quite quickly, you'll end up getting blocked or having
| to complete a captcha. I haven't done so in a while so I'm not
| sure what their current behaviour is.
|
| Main reason being there's plenty data mining, e.g. looking for
| "powered by wordpress" and vulnerable versions, and generally all
| kinds of data mining that involve very specific requests for
| information, likely queries that aren't creating revenue, either.
| iandanforth wrote:
| The email specific queries don't appear to work. The "@" is
| ignored by google so you just get results for the domain string.
| abarrettwilsdon wrote:
| The first two appear to still work, but the third does not.
|
| The permutation searches are tricky because you don't know if a
| lack of results means the email does not exist, or just hasn't
| been posted anywhere indexed
|
| Will update and credit
| voldacar wrote:
| Why doesn't google.com have a comprehensive list of these? I'm
| constantly seeing new ones that I didn't know about, but google
| never teaches you about them so you have to find them in obscure
| blog posts
| beefield wrote:
| > Why doesn't google.com have a comprehensive list of these?
|
| It is quite obvious that google does not give a s&it whether I
| find what I think I want to find. Google is much more
| interested in 1) serving me ads they think are most profitable
| and 2) giving me results _they_ think I want.
| KorfmannArno wrote:
| My guess would be because Google eventually wants users to find
| everything via natural language queries.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Actually, Google _eventually_ wants users to find everything
| with predictive AI giving it to them before they search. That
| 's not really a secret, they've announced more than once in
| the past that that is what they are increasingly working
| toward.
| souprock wrote:
| That would be great for malware researchers. Google can
| give them malware before they even search for it!
|
| The reality is that all sorts of things are blocked now,
| including things that are perfectly legal.
| lizardmancan wrote:
| the goal is to make you look at advertisement
| vezycash wrote:
| Google randomly ignores "search term in quotes".
|
| Related:examplesite.com used to work well. Now, it's better to
| use sites like alternativeto.net.
|
| ~phrase is unnecessary because but google searches for synonyms
| by default
|
| phrase1 + phrase2 - Google randomly ignores it. I use it this
| way +compulsoryTerm
|
| Although rare, there are things I simply can't find using
| Google. But Bing would. If Google keeps it up, other search
| engines would benefit.
| stanislavb wrote:
| Ah, I never knew "related:" existed. Also, saashub.com could
| be used as an alternative to alternativeto.net :)
| EE84M3i wrote:
| I would be interested to see an example of it ignoring quotes
| silently because I've heard a lot about it. I use search
| terms in quotes relatively often and have never noticed that,
| although it does the 'did you mean without quotes' thing all
| the time.
|
| In the past for very long tail content, I've found Bing and
| Yandex to be useful. Yandex image search in particular is
| often better than Google or Bing, particularly if you are
| searching for people because it does some facial recognition.
| ewired wrote:
| Doing some "related:" queries returns some interesting
| results that look human-curated and out-of-date.
| related:google.com shows results for Yahoo, Bing, AOL Search,
| and HotBot (which used to be a search engine, but the brand
| is now for a VPN provider).
| EE84M3i wrote:
| One reason they might not have a comprehensive list is because
| some might be relatively expensive to execute, but they
| can't/won't disable them for legacy reasons.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > One reason they might not have a comprehensive list is
| because some might be relatively expensive to execute, but
| they can't/won't disable them for legacy reasons.
|
| Ah, Google, always so reluctant to get rid of anything legacy
| because of their fanatical devotion to their existing user
| base.
| [deleted]
| mrnuclear wrote:
| At least now we are somewhat more empowered to find obscure
| blog posts. Which raises the suggestion that hackers are
| advantaged towards finding information. Which raises the
| suggestion that we should take the independent initiative of
| using SEO to inform more people about how to become search
| super-users.
| abraae wrote:
| Having a reliable search syntax would commoditise Google as
| other search engines could offer the same options. Having just
| a search box, instead of lots of options was how they moved
| ahead of e.g altavista in the first place.
|
| Google would rather people are trained to just type human speak
| into the search box.
| lstamour wrote:
| https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en but
| it's not complete. My favourite is actually the "range"
| operator. I don't need it often, but when combined with the
| exact match quotation marks, it's great. For example, here's a
| search for Sony bluetooth headphones available on Amazon.ca for
| between CA$100 and $150:
| https://www.google.com/search?rls=en&q=site%3Aamazon.ca+%22C...
|
| The range operator also works great with years, dates, though
| the Tools menu with shortcuts for before: and after: operators
| can help there too.
|
| One I haven't seen mentioned yet but used to be documented is
| that you can leave out words in a phrase by replacing them with
| an asterisk. I'm having trouble not italicizing text in this
| comment box, so pretend \\* means a single asterisk: "Stocks
| rose today by \\* percent" as a search matches the phrase
| "stocks rose today, led by a 4.4 percent". (Which until this
| post, had only one result on Google.)
|
| Note that it's not 100% exact matching, because for actually
| exact matches you have to select "Verbatim" under Tools > All
| Results in the menu below the search box on the results page.
|
| The only downside to using all these operators is that you'll
| get very familiar and frustrated with the Google reCAPTCHA
| prompts as your search is "too precise to be human". Even when
| signed in to Google, especially often in Safari on an iPhone.
| Sigh.
| BeeOnRope wrote:
| You can use three asterisks in a row, surrounded by
| whitespace, to get a single asterisk like: "Stocks rose today
| by __* percent ".
|
| Oddly, this results in a non-italicized asterisk in the
| output, contrary to reports in earlier comments that the
| resulting asterisk would be in italics. There is, however, a
| zero-length italicized string right before the asterisk in
| the HTML: "Stocks rose today by <i></i>*
| percent".
| JadeNB wrote:
| > Oddly, this results in a non-italicized asterisk in the
| output, contrary to reports in earlier comments that the
| resulting asterisk would be in italics. There is, however,
| a zero-length italicized string right before the asterisk
| in the HTML:
|
| > "Stocks rose today by <i></i>* percent".
|
| Sounds like the matching is something like
| /\<\*.*\*/
|
| or maybe /\<\*[^*]*\*/
|
| rather than /\<\*.+*/
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Is there actually a page that says "too precise to be human"
| or are you just assuming this is what triggered the
| reCAPTCHA?
|
| If there is such a page, can you give an example query that
| would trigger it?
| lstamour wrote:
| It mostly happens using "site:" queries which I use
| frequently to limit things to local websites (by domain) or
| for searching sites that have poor search engines (Amazon,
| for example). It rarely happens the first query, but often
| by the third or fourth modification or by the third or
| fourth page of results you visit, it will show a reCAPTCHA
| if it doesn't have enough "randomness" or doesn't think
| you're actually browsing Google and third-party sites the
| way others commonly do. (Robots are more likely to use
| search operators, for example, and more likely to pretend
| to be iPhones so they don't have to move the mouse, etc.)
|
| My earlier query triggered it. Without a query, I can make
| the following text show up by going to
| https://www.google.com/sorry/index which when a relevant
| query is attached to the URL, it shows a reCAPTCHA for the
| search query, and also shows your IP address, etc.
|
| > About this page
|
| > Our systems have detected unusual traffic from your
| computer network. This page checks to see if it's really
| you sending the requests, and not a robot. Why did this
| happen?
|
| If you click the link "Why did this happen?" it says:
|
| > This page appears when Google automatically detects
| requests coming from your computer network which appear to
| be in violation of the Terms of Service[1]. The block will
| expire shortly after those requests stop. In the meantime,
| solving the above CAPTCHA will let you continue to use our
| services.
|
| > This traffic may have been sent by malicious software, a
| browser plug-in, or a script that sends automated requests.
| If you share your network connection, ask your
| administrator for help -- a different computer using the
| same IP address may be responsible. Learn more[2]
|
| > Sometimes you may be asked to solve the CAPTCHA if you
| are using advanced terms that robots are known to use, or
| sending requests very quickly.
|
| [1]: https://www.google.com/policies/terms/ [2]:
| https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/86640
|
| The annoying part is that my account has never been
| whitelisted based on good behaviour. Instead, I end up
| seeing such reCAPTCHAs thousands of times a year, to the
| point where I stop counting them. Roughly half the time
| I'll answer the reCAPTCHA and the other half of the time,
| I'll close the tab and go do something else. Cloudflare
| site loading captchas are even worse, though. They delay
| the site by 5 seconds while they "check my browser", and
| then show an hCAPTCHA to solve, even when I'm already
| signed in with the first-party site. Very annoying, though
| the captcha is often easier to solve than Google's. The
| Cloudflare block often on streaming media websites.
| Ironically, Cloudflare's captchas have never prevented me
| from using commonly available Python scripts to watch
| streaming flash videos in VLC, they only block my web
| browsing...
|
| I can only assume that Safari's excellent ad blocking and
| tracking prevention is causing my browsing traffic to stand
| out compared to others', enough that it prompts these
| CAPTCHAs more frequently.
| malwarebytess wrote:
| NLP and to a lesser extent SEO has vastly diminished the value of
| this type of searching.
| yourad_io wrote:
| Fun fact: googling for -273.15 without double quotes produces no
| results.
|
| You need to quote negative arithmetic values when searching, even
| if there are no other query parameters. It made me wonder if I
| was misremembering absolute zero.
| Shared404 wrote:
| Syntax for doing things like this with DDG:
|
| https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sy...
| kps wrote:
| I'd switch to DDG in a half second if they supported the full
| query syntax of altavista.digital.com (see
| http://jkorpela.fi/altavista/ if you've forgotten). Disclaimer:
| I work for, um, Google.
| Shared404 wrote:
| I do wish they supported a larger search syntax. My current
| workaround is I have a massive bookmark folder of alternative
| search engines that I try if I'm not having luck narrowing
| things down enough.
| lsiebert wrote:
| That might make an interesting blog post
| Shared404 wrote:
| I'm still mid-setting up a blog, but I'll keep that in
| mind once I've got it up and running.
|
| I'm afraid it probably wouldn't be that interesting to
| HN'ers though, because this is where I found most of
| them.
| marcrosoft wrote:
| I love the "inject JS into the page to find stuff" hack. The
| author mentions local "site you are on" but this can be applied
| with headless chrome to crawl many sites.
| flywheel wrote:
| That's web scraping 101
| lizardmancan wrote:
| https://www.google.nl/search?q=site%3A+news.ycombinator.com+...
|
| i use to use these a lot but now it's just useless
| abarrettwilsdon wrote:
| Try wrapping lizardmancan in quotation marks - "lizardmancan".
| That narrows it down to 10 results for me
|
| (also: you'll want to remove the space between site: and
| news.ycombinator.com)
| mikequinlan wrote:
| You need to remove the blank after the colon.
|
| https://www.google.nl/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+l...
| uniqueid wrote:
| Last week I blocked every * .google.* domain on my network except
| "youtube-ui.l.google.com".
|
| Google Search: (1) ask a natural language question (since actual
| search is hobbled) (2) get unrelated garbage and ads back (3)
| blame yourself for "not being technical enough" to understand why
| the results aren't actually garbage.
|
| Google Search has deteriorated to the point that so far I haven't
| missed it _at all_.
| ip_addr wrote:
| What search do you prefer and why?
| uniqueid wrote:
| I prefer Google circa 2005, but DDG and Bing work better for
| me now.
|
| I've never wanted anything fancy:
|
| - don't show me paid search results - show me a blank page if
| there are no results - make it easy to 'AND' terms (+include
| +search +terms) - most importantly: search for my damned
| search terms! If you want to "did you mean" my spelling,
| fine. I don't really care. But it's unacceptable to _ever_
| drop a search term.
|
| I have plenty of other complaints about Google, but in terms
| of search quality, those are the relevant ones.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| What is it you are searching for that the results are useless?
| fortyseven wrote:
| Indeed. This seems like a bit overreacting. Google is lots of
| things, but a shitty search engine to the point of deserving
| being blocked is not one of them.
| uniqueid wrote:
| > a shitty search engine to the point of >
| deserving being blocked is not one of them.
|
| Google's search quality isn't why I blocked Google. I've
| _wanted_ to block Google for over half a decade, but the
| excellence of their search stopped me. That stopped being
| an issue this year.
| darepublic wrote:
| Google still good for coding related searches
| snakeboy wrote:
| To be fair, I suspect "coding related searches" are easy for
| any search engine, given
|
| 1. the immense online/open-source nature of the profession:
| every blog/forum question and answer/documentation since the
| origin of the profession being in plain-text and mostly
| publicly accessible by default
|
| 2. and it all revolves around a precise, limited vocabulary.
| JadeNB wrote:
| Depends on what coding-related search, I think. Searching for
| C is useless unless you know to search for clang, for
| example; but then you get results for the compiler. If you're
| trying to search for lesser known languages with short names
| or names that overlap with common words, then forget it!
| (Arguably that's a fault of the language, but arguably
| arguably you shouldn't have to choose what to name your
| creation based on Google.)
| IdiocyInAction wrote:
| You get SEO crap very often though IME.
| spanhandler wrote:
| Depends on the platform and what you're looking for. Some
| operating systems and languages/ecosystems are worse than
| others. Windows stuff is largely _incredibly_ bad (not
| saying Windows is bad, for this reason anyway, just that
| search results for anything MS-related tend to be awful).
| The nerdier the OS and less "corporate" the language, the
| better the results get.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _The nerdier the OS and less "corporate" the language,
| the better the results get._
|
| But don't get _too_ obscure. Otherwise, you 'll discover
| that Google has dropped the information you require from
| its index because it's not new or trendy enough.
|
| If we can get Taylor Swift interested in the old
| internet, then Google will suddenly snap back into
| usefulness.
| uniqueid wrote:
| Ever spent three minutes opening useless links from Google's
| Search results, only to realize they dropped the keyword you
| searched? That seems quite common now, especially with
| programming keywords, which are often obscure.
|
| Remember Google Code Search, and Google (Usenet) Groups? Back
| then, Google cared about this stuff. Now they seem only to
| want to show you furniture ads, or get you to use their Zoom
| knockoff, etc.
|
| These days Google substitutes the heck out of searches.
| Perhaps it's better if you've logged in, but I'd rather hack
| my leg off with a rusty saw than voluntarily log in to an
| account just to search the web.
| chris_f wrote:
| A few corrections:
|
| The + (formerly used to force a term to be present in the result)
| and ~ (also find synonyms) operators have been deprecated.
|
| Google now advises to wrap the word in quotes instead of using
| the +. Google will also automatically look for synonyms without
| the use of ~.
|
| I have seen 'AROUND(n)' mentioned in many other places working as
| a proximity operator in Google, but I don't believe that is true
| and haven't found it to work in any logical way.
|
| Also the use of parentheses to nest queries is not necessary in
| Google. It is actually required for Bing on complicated queries
| though.
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| No longer have Google Chrome on any devices, switched over to
| Chromium Edge.
|
| Same browser, different overloads.
|
| Left the default search engine as Bing, but only because Duck
| Duck Go is useless for geographicly local search.
| GordonS wrote:
| Worth mentioning that even if you put a term in double quotes,
| Google _still_ tries to be too clever - you are not guaranteed
| to get results that contain your quotes search term : /
| solarist wrote:
| As a workaround and under search tools one can enable the
| "verbatim" option.
| GordonS wrote:
| AFAICT, the verbatim option gives the same results as if
| I'd quoted my search term?
| solarist wrote:
| In my experience it depends on the number of results, and
| the results are more accurate with verbatim.
| jlokier wrote:
| I was under the impression "verbatim" is to disable filter-
| bubble personalisation.
|
| Normal queries are tailored to your personal filter bubble.
| You can't see what other people see from same search, and
| if you're doing SEO or just trying to find who tends to
| come top in results for something you have a lot of history
| looking at, you can't tell who comes top for other people.
| devjungle wrote:
| This must be a recent change? It's been driving me nuts
| lately. I have to resort to adding a lot of negated search
| terms to compensate but it's still sub optimal.
| GordonS wrote:
| No, this has been the case for a long time, years anyway. I
| don't know if it goes back quite as far as when they
| removed the '+' operator tho.
|
| But bejesus, this drives me nuts! If I know the double
| quotes function even exists, then Google should know I
| actually want to use it as intended - it shouldn't decide
| "yeah, but _maybe_ you 'd like these irrelevant results
| too!"
| JasonFruit wrote:
| It seems to me that after a few negated search terms are
| included, they are taken less strictly; "minus" seems to
| mean "probably minus".
| nostromo wrote:
| And even if that exact term is present on popular websites,
| like Stack Overflow, Google still seems to have trouble
| finding those exact results regularly.
| abarrettwilsdon wrote:
| Updated the article to reflect and credited you for the
| contribution!
| EE84M3i wrote:
| When you say "deprecated", you mean as in "discontinued" right?
| Not just like, discouraged?
| flywheel wrote:
| Whoever the first developer was that used "deprecated" got it
| kind of wrong, the word should have been "depreciated".
|
| Deprecate: "express disapproval of."
|
| Depreciate: "diminish in value over a period of time."
|
| I kind of cringe when other developers say "deprecated".
|
| Edit: Versioning and not removing APIs is kind of the way to
| go, so you don't break client apps that possibly can't be
| updated easily or at all. "Depreciated" is a far better word
| to use with a far better outcome. AWS versions their APIs,
| they don't remove old ones. "I disapprove of using this API
| and we're taking it away at some random date" vs "this isn't
| the latest API, use the current one for new development"
| seems like a pretty stark difference in thinking to me. YMMV.
| theodric wrote:
| You could not be more wrong if you practiced every day http
| s://www.etymonline.com/word/deprecate#etymonline_v_29603
| tines wrote:
| But "express disapproval of" is exactly the meaning
| intended when we say that a feature is deprecated. It
| signifies that it is best practice not to use it.
| harha wrote:
| If it's given as a warning then yes, e.g. the dplyr
| package in R sometimes outputs "feature xyz is deprecated
| and will be removed in version x.x".
|
| Often though it's used when the feature is already
| removed, i.e., it's not only best practice not to use it,
| but also impossible with that version.
| efreak wrote:
| In this case, depreciated is incorrect. Removal has
| already happened, the "period of time" is already over.
| flywheel wrote:
| Removing APIs is not a great practice though. Look at
| AWS, they version their APIs, they don't just remove
| them, and removing them should be unnecessary if your
| underlying tech isn't brittle and badly written.
| "Depreciated" is a far better term to use, with a far
| better outcome in my opinion. Companies that remove old
| versions of APIs and break existing client apps (that
| possibly can't be udpated) really suck.
| oceanswave wrote:
| The "public APIs form an immutable, irrevocable contract"
| argument means that an api layer with these tenants is
| always going to be a source of technical debt. Get it
| right the first time or fight an ever growing
| compatibility matainance war - even when your
| instrumentation is saying that old apis aren't being
| used, just published, seems like a footgun
| hamburglar wrote:
| 1) Whether you agree with the practice doesn't affect the
| terminology used. People remove APIs. Before doing that,
| they deprecate them for a period to advise people to move
| off of them.
|
| 2) If you were to always maintain backward compatibility,
| how is "depreciated" in any way an accurate term? If the
| old API continues to work indefinitely, its value stays
| the same.
| smichel17 wrote:
| I don't think these two are incompatible?
|
| If APIv3 has a `/foo` endpoint that is deprecated,
| usually I take that to mean that the developers
| discourage its use, and likely plan to remove it in a
| future version (say, APIv4 or APIv5). `/foo` will never
| be removed from APIv3, because that would be a breaking
| change, and so if I'm willing to stay on v3 forever,
| that's fine, but in the (likely) event I will want to
| take advantage of new features at some point in the
| future, I'm doing myself a disservice by using /foo
| because it will make the migration harder.
|
| There is at least one case where I think "deprecated" is
| clearly, inarguably, the right word: when the developer
| _wants_ to remove a part of an API (say, because it is a
| large maintenance burden), but it 's also committed to
| stability, so they _won 't_ remove that api until some
| acceptably small number of users are using it.
| eigenvector wrote:
| Isn't deprecated actually correct here?
|
| It means the feature still works, but will be removed in
| the future or is no longer supported. There also be may a
| new implementation of it that the developer would like you
| to use, hence the warning that it's deprecated.
|
| Depreciation implies a rate of change over time, which
| isn't the case. Today we deprecate feature X, and in two
| years we plan remove it. It never depreciates.
| cjaybo wrote:
| The first definition is intended and more fitting for the
| usages of "deprecated" I've encountered.
| hamburglar wrote:
| This is a jaw-droppingly arrogant attitude. You're trying
| to justify your own incorrect usage by asserting that the
| person who coined the term decades ago "got it kind of
| wrong"? And you cringe when others get it right?
|
| "Depreciated" is absolutely the wrong term, because it
| implies that the value is less, when the intent is to
| communicate "this is still fully functional, but you are
| warned away from it because it is targeted for future
| removal." Deprecated.
| TallGuyShort wrote:
| Feels like I often see it used to retire APIs that are now
| understood to be unsafe, insecure, or otherwise a bad
| practice for some reason. It gets replaced with an API that
| does not inherently have that problem, and the old one is
| in deprecated. it feels like "expressing disapproval of" is
| the right definition in that case. It's only there for a
| migration period to happen more gracefully, but its
| continued use is frowned upon, and not just because it will
| eventually be removed.
| Xophmeister wrote:
| I used to always use "depreciated" until I was
| embarrassingly corrected one day :P
| hamburglar wrote:
| To be frank, grandparent sounds like someone who was
| corrected one day, and rather than learn something and
| move on, dug in and developed a detailed justification
| for why the rest of the world was mistaken so he can
| cringe about their ignorance.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Nope.
|
| It is deprecated -- it's use is disapproved of, you should
| stop using it. In the future it will go away but for now it
| works, so you _can_ use it, but its use is discouraged.
|
| Depreciated doesn't make any sense -- the value of the
| deprecated API does not diminish over time. It works, until
| it stops working. It's on or off. It doesn't work less and
| less every month or anything. It currently still works
| completely, but is deprecated -- that is, discouraged. At
| some point in the future, it will stop working, completely.
|
| the rest of us don't just kind of but REALLY cringe when
| people say "depreciate" when they mean "deprecate". They
| are different words, "deprecated" is the right one, it is
| intentional, it is the word.
|
| Sorry, you are the one using the wrong word.
| flywheel wrote:
| Yeah, nope yourself. It seems like a lot of people aren't
| really thinking this through very much.
|
| And that is absolutely the wrong way to approach API
| development. An API that is being sun-setted should never
| be removed, because older clients could still use it but
| sometimes can't be upgraded to newer clients. Removing a
| v1 API breaks those clients and it's a shitty thing to do
| to users. Yeah, people should be building NEW things with
| it, but there's no reason to look at the v1 API with
| "disgust" as "deprecated" implies - It's simply an older
| version that should remain functional, if your system is
| worth half a shit. AWS doesn't terminate older API
| versions, they just create new versions. Or you can be
| like Facebook and "deprecate" stuff and just shut it down
| before your official shutdown date, or not give any
| notice at all - that's REALLY a fun culture to work in, I
| guess, for them. "deprecated" is a really negative word,
| and doesn't even really translate to anything good in
| terms of software development. It's my opinion that
| "depreciated" is a far better word and far better outcome
| when used in software development instead of
| "deprecated". YMMV.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| OK, I understand you have an opinion that API design
| should be done in a certain way (by the way, by "API" I
| meant like method signatures, not network API, but it
| could be either).
|
| And I understand you disapprove of the word "deprecated"
| being used to refer to API that is discouraged, usually
| because it will be no longer supported/going away in the
| future.
|
| But that doesn't change the history of the word. The word
| "deprecated" is what engineers have been using,
| intentionally, for several decades.
|
| "Depreciated" is a mistaken variation. Even if you think
| "deprecated" has unfortunate connotations, it still
| doesn't make "depreciated" right. "Depreciated", as you
| said, means losing value over time. That is, 10% a year
| or something. Deprecated API does not "lose value over
| time".
|
| The word "deprecated" has historically been used to mean
| that certain API (again, likely a method or function, I
| don't mean network api specifically) is now discouraged,
| it's use is disapproved of. Usually becuase it will be
| going away in the future. Arguments about whether this is
| the right way to do API change are entirely separate to
| this historical and current usage, where API change often
| IS done this way, and it's what the word is used for.
|
| You can have opinions of how you'd like to people to
| handle API change over time, but that doesn't chagne the
| fact that "deprecated" is the word engineers have meant
| to use for decades. If you'd like to advocate for a
| differnet word and/or different practice you can -- but
| all "depreciated" has going for it is it sounds
| confusingly similar to "deprecated", it is not the word
| you are looking for.
|
| > Not to be confused with Depreciation.
|
| > In several fields, deprecation is the discouragement of
| use of some terminology, feature, design, or practice,
| typically because it has been superseded or is no longer
| considered efficient or safe, without completely removing
| it or prohibiting its use.
|
| > It can also imply that a feature, design, or practice
| will be removed or discontinued entirely in the future
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deprecation
|
| > In accountancy, depreciation refers to two aspects of
| the same concept: first, the actual decrease of fair
| value of an asset, such as the decrease in value of
| factory equipment each year as it is used and wears, and
| second, the allocation in accounting statements of the
| original cost of the assets to periods in which the
| assets are used (depreciation with the matching
| principle)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depreciation
|
| > In economics, depreciation is the gradual decrease in
| the economic value of the capital stock of a firm, nation
| or other entity, either through physical depreciation,
| obsolescence or changes in the demand for the services of
| the capital in question.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depreciation_(economics)
|
| Depreciation has nothing to do with what we're talking
| about, it's not the right word. Deprecation is the word
| that has been used for decades for API whose use is
| discouraged, often because it will not be supported in
| the future. You can argue that a new term is needed, but
| that's your argument not a historical usage, and there's
| no reason you need to limit yourselves to words that
| sound confusingly similar to "deprecation".
| [deleted]
| mehrdadn wrote:
| The plus operator in the page appears to be binary rather than
| unary. I've never used it. Is that affected as well? (Though
| I'm confused why AND is necessary. Isn't it implied normally?)
| chris_f wrote:
| That is correct. AND is added by default and is never
| necessary in Google.
|
| It's a little confusing because fo how Google implemented
| some of the operators. The boolean + operator in many cases
| is used in the same way as AND, but Google originally used it
| to let users to force a specific word to be present in a
| search result.
|
| So a search for Fish +Chips was a search for both words, but
| 'Chips' MUST be present. The equivalent search today is Fish
| "Chips". It's a little annoying because it requires typing
| another character, and it it is still not always respected.
| jhbadger wrote:
| Does filetype: still work? I'm getting zero hits for example
| filetype:epub
| choo-t wrote:
| It still work but some file type never return anything, I have
| the same problem with epub, pretty sure it's some google's
| shenanigan about books piracy.
|
| https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35287?hl=en
| achairapart wrote:
| Maybe Google doesn't index epub at all? I think I never saw
| one in search results.
| choo-t wrote:
| Well, I may have become crazy but i have vivid memory using
| it in the past, and some websites even refer to this
| specific query ( https://ebookfriendly.com/google-search-
| tips-books/ )
| chc wrote:
| I'm kind of surprised to see Google brought back the + operator.
| I remember they prominently changed its meaning when they made it
| the @ of Google+, and I never bothered to check again after it
| died.
| yuvadam wrote:
| Dorking is not that easy to do, Google is very easy on assuming
| you are being malicious on certain queries, try one too many and
| you'll hit their dreaded captcha that is impossible to pass.
| userbinator wrote:
| That really angers me, and I've tripped it more times than I
| can count, usually by searching for very specific things.
| Coworkers have also run into it multiple times (before everyone
| started working from home, we would exclaim "Fuck you, Google!"
| and raise a middle finger to the screen, which was a cue to
| everyone else to help).
|
| The fact that they think you're "not human" when you use a
| search engine for its intended purpose and show how much you
| know how to use it is both disturbing and saddening. I wonder
| if Google's own employees run into it and/or the continuing
| degradation of results, or if they're somehow given immunity
| and a much better set of results...
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| I'm curious about this. Can you give an example of the kind
| of query you are talking about where Google assumes you are a
| bot and not a human?
| uj8efdkjfdshf wrote:
| You could always keep Google Chrome open to rerun these
| specific queries, as the captchas are less irritating to
| solve then.
| weisbaum wrote:
| This is a pretty common practice among SEOs for a variety of
| different reasons. They are also known as advanced search
| operators.
|
| Ahrefs has a pretty comprehensive list here:
| https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators/
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| I have a question for anyone reading this thread:
|
| Do you believe you can get consistent results with _any_ search?
|
| For example, if we pick some _uncommon_ search terms will we get
| the same results on the first search, the second search, the
| third, etc. Or will the results change?
|
| I did a search with some terms from one of the comments in this
| thread, in quotes. The first search returned only one result:
| this thread.
|
| As I searched the same quoted terms repeatedly along with
| additional terms, more results were returned that contained the
| exact string of original terms. Surprised by this, I tried a
| search with only the original terms, in quotes, once again. This
| time the search returned more than just the one result.
| abarrettwilsdon wrote:
| If it's specific enough, the SERP should stay the same until
| someone else publishes the same thing
|
| e.g. the search of another article "set up Google Sheets APIs
| (and treat Sheets like a database)"
|
| turns up my site and a couple Twitter threads talking about it
| (plus a phishing site which has scraped and republished it). I
| presume that will stay the same b/c it's such a specific title
| phrase (but not because searches are necessarily deterministic)
| the_jeremy wrote:
| All I want is the ability to search for symbols. Symbolhound.com
| is the only site I've heard that will support that, but it leaves
| a lot to be desired.
| Brakenshire wrote:
| It's strange to me that more domain-specific search engines
| haven't been created. There must be value in a programmer-
| specific search engine for instance. Or why aren't there search
| engines that specialise in news, social media, Q&A websites or
| events, to give a few examples.
| surround wrote:
| Exploit database with more dorks
|
| https://www.exploit-db.com/google-hacking-database
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Why is this called "dorking"? "Dorking" is a word that just means
| using search engines to find very specific data? This seems
| bizarre to me. Why does this need a special word?
|
| Or it actually means using search operators beyond natural
| language entry? That's what this page seems to be about? I don't
| know why that would be called "dorking" either?
| p410n3 wrote:
| It all started with a def con talk if I remember correctly.
|
| https://youtu.be/N3dzVl40lQA
| sawaruna wrote:
| Might be my librarian career bias but I'm always surprised at how
| few people know about query operators. Ironically as Google
| search seems to be ignoring vital parts of people's queries, they
| are becoming more needed now, whereas years ago I would have
| assumed a constantly improving Google search would get better at
| determining what I was looking for.
| colordrops wrote:
| The operators don't work as well as they used to, and even when
| using them lots of results are still left out or are not an
| exact match. The combination of the SEO arms race and Google's
| algorithms to filter "bad" information make it nearly
| impossible to find some things. Sometimes you are looking for
| that "bad" piece of info as a counter example rather than a
| source of truth, and don't need google's patronizing filtering,
| so would prefer exact string matches. But apparently they know
| better than you.
| kebman wrote:
| You don't even wanna know how many times specialized searches
| have saved my ass, after multiple years on uni, and working as
| a writer, journalist, programmer, en even a musician! You can
| safely say that my entire life revolves around being good at
| doing various forms of searches.
| sawaruna wrote:
| No doubt. Enjoying & (feeling like compared to others I was)
| excelling at finding information was what made me get
| interested in information science in the first place, but I
| often felt advances in ML and NLP would allow for anyone to
| find exactly what they wanted (which would be great) even
| considering the increasing amount of information to have to
| search through. Google's 'I'm going to ignore half the words
| in your search query' seem to be moving away from that for
| whatever reason.
| Wistar wrote:
| I have long believed that the art of precision search should
| be taught at the primary level. It is a necessary skill.
| flywheel wrote:
| Prediction: Using the methods of "dorking", this is the only page
| on the internet among 10 million+ results that is calling this
| "dorking".
| montjoy wrote:
| I hope it doesn't catch on since it makes me die a little
| inside. It's a very Reddit-type word though. I can easily
| imagine it being used by non-technical folk and tech
| journalists.
| neilduncan wrote:
| I live two towns over from Dorking.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorking
| tutfbhuf wrote:
| This is reddit humor, that I sometimes miss here. Thx
| neilduncan.
| tomalpha wrote:
| I grew up in Dorking, but this is the first time (that I can
| remember...) that I actually read its wikipedia article.
|
| TIL: No one knows why 'Dorking' is called 'Dorking', but
| there's a English Place Names Society which since the 1920's
| has researched the origins of town names in England, and is
| considered [0] to be "the established national body on the
| subject".
|
| [0] https://epns.nottingham.ac.uk/
| aidos wrote:
| Also weird for me to see the name here (I'm in the next village
| over), not one you see popping up often. I occasionally wonder
| how many other HNers there are scattered about in my local area
| (I suspect not many).
| zeristor wrote:
| Didn't it feature in "War of the Worlds"?
|
| My Dad worked for Mullard, which was renamed to Philips
| Electronics and relocated to Dorking.
| chrisb wrote:
| I live just a few miles to the North. Nice to see a few other
| ~Dorking locals here :)
| julian_t wrote:
| Slightly more than a few miles, but still pretty local (KT4)!
| indit wrote:
| A very comprehensive and frequently updated list is here:
| https://www.exploit-db.com/google-hacking-database
| harha wrote:
| I think it would be useful to be able to explicitly search around
| knowledge graph entities or site topics, e.g. a programming
| language, a city, a season, without having that single/specific
| term.
|
| So a search including all sites related to an entity, say Munich
| or python along with the terms the user is searching because a
| page might then not specifically include the entity in its
| keywords or the text on the site or have a different language or
| use a synonym.
|
| I'm sure search engines consider this somewhat, but explicitly
| activating such a feature would be a great improvement for the
| user.
|
| Stackexchange has this feature with tags (using []), with user
| curated tags. Would be nice to have in DDG or google.
| epanchin wrote:
| Businesses don't game stackexchange.
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