Advanced Google search techniques

[Bill Ryan]

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Hi, All (and this may also be useful for our many guests and visitors) —

It occurred to me it might be valuable to many to feature a few handy (and hard-won!) tips and hints about searching. This is a 100% essential toolbox for any researcher. And that means everyone reading this.

I often find myself looking for the actual source of images, phrases of text, and bits and pieces of information that — all too often — are misrepresented, many times innocently, by others. We see eyes of hurricanes presented as proof of entrances to the 'hollow earth', 'spaceships' which are really from video games, 'monsters' which are really from an art exhibition.

By not knowing how to search properly for things, we often tie ourselves into knots. And that helps no-one but our enemies out (and up) there.

So, here's Internet Searching 101.

There are two pages every one of you might consider bookmarking:

1. Google Advanced Search: http://google.com/advanced_search
2. Google Image Search: http://images.google.com

First, an important note: I'm 100% aware that there are other, safer search sites that don't store personal information. But the fact remains that Google Advanced Search and Google Image Search are among the most useful research tools out there.

If you want to use these anonymously, then use Tor as your browser. It looks and works just like Firefox, but hides (and deliberately misrepresents) your IP address. That's the 'internet fingerprint' that can sometimes lead straight to your computer, and very often reveals your general location. It also is used routinely to match and correlate searches and web activity of every kind.

To download the Tor browser, go here: http://torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en



Okay, to Google Advanced Search.

The Advanced Search page allows you to refine your search in many detailed ways:

• Search for phrases rather than words
• Search within a particular site
• Search for terms within a URL or a web page title (not the text of the page itself)
• ... and more.

After a little familiarity, you can see there are simple shortcuts:

To search for Project Avalon, then enter your search phrase in inverted commas — like this:

"Project Avalon"

You can enter a multi-word phrase, as well, like this:

"Bill Ryan, founder of Project Avalon"

To search within a specified site, use this format: site:example.com (leaving out the 'http://' and the 'www'). So to search for Bill Ryan within Coast to Coast AM, use

site:coasttocoastam.com "Bill Ryan"

To search for a term within a URL (web link), like Stanley Kubrick, then use

allinurl: "Stanley Kubrick"

That also works for the TITLE of a web page, like

allintitle: "Stanley Kubrick"

I often use searching for blocks of text (like this: "Stanley Kubrick faked the Apollo Moon landings") to find (e.g.) real sources of articles that have been copied and pasted multiple times.

Note also that on many browsers, your search function will also allow you to look for results published in particular periods of time (like today, last week, last month, last year, or any specified period you like).

That's many times enabled me to find the very first month/year a particular piece of text was published — very useful (e.g.) for locating the source of hoaxes which then get believed and reposted frequently thereafter.



Searching for images is also EXTREMELY useful. That enables you to

• Find where an image really came from (and therefore, from the text of the page, what it is or may be)
• Find larger/smaller versions of the same image (useful for posting on web pages like the forum).

To do this, you can simply paste the known URL (web link) of an image into your Google search bar. As best I know, any browser supports that. I use a Mac, and find Firefox is more useful that Safari for this, but both will get the job done.

On Firefox, my preference (please note: I don't use Chrome, and know nothing about it), if you paste an image URL — something that ends with .jpg, .gif, .png, .tiff, or .bmp — into the search bar, Firefox will tell you that it can't find the URL, and asks if you want to search by image. So you click on that link which is offered... and you then get all the web pages containing that image.

If you have an unknown or unsourced image on your desktop, and want to find out where THAT came from, then use Google Image Search and simply upload the image. You do that by dragging and dropping your image to a particular part of the page. (Just start doing that, and the 'drag-image-here' area will show itself.)

You then get all the pages where that image is featured on the web. I've found that fairly few people seem to know about this, and it's fantastically useful for identifying things.

~~~

I'll stop (or pause) there — and I hope this may be useful to many of you, whether you're forum members or not. There's more, of course (deep searching is a real art, no kidding) — and I sincerely welcome all other tips and hints that others may know about... and that I do not.

[Daozen]

The minus function is very useful for filtering unwanted searches:

Examples:

Nutritional Kale -Livestrong

Project Avalon -Arthur -King

"Secret Space Program" -Delusional -Plagarist

Edit to add from Bill (great examples ^^ , by the way!): Many thanks — yes, this is also extremely useful sometimes. If you enter in Google...

"Kerry Cassidy" -Ryan

...the little 'minus' sign before 'Ryan' means you'll get all the pages with Kerry Cassidy in the text, but which do NOT also contain 'Ryan'.

[TargeT]

After you get that down, you can get into meta data searching (aka, google trends).... This is more like "social searching" it gives you an idea of what everyone else is interested in.


Data alone is just data, you need CONTEXT to utilize it best.

Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dH8AV-9Abjs

[Ultima Thule]

As just today a breaking news about Obama stepping down and Ryan substituting him as president surfaced, this thread bears great importance. How can you track down these types of posts to where they actually originated from? Is it possible to find out for example who exactly is running hollowearth -site and many others? I am not savvy but am interested in hearing is this possible? Is it possible to track down the disinfo to its origins - ip address and/or to the person who wrote the text?

UT

[TargeT]

Posted by Ultima Thule (here)
As just today a breaking news about Obama stepping down and Ryan substituting him as president surfaced, this thread bears great importance. How can you track down these types of posts to where they actually originated from? Is it possible to find out for example who exactly is running hollowearth -site and many others? I am not savvy but am interested in hearing is this possible? Is it possible to track down the disinfo to its origins - ip address and/or to the person who wrote the text?

UT

it is very probably possible, do you have the time or desire how ever... that is the question

Since you will have to work with public information (ie info that is basically volunteered) you'll have to do a lot of correlation between different sources to get at what you want, but it can be done usually.

[Midnight Rambler]

When I search for a particular file type I use filetype:pdf for example and the search results are only pdf. You can do this with all sorts of file types. It helps me find vector logo as I am a graphic designer.

When searching on a particular site I use site:www.projectavalon.net for example and I get only results of that particular site.

Use the tools in combination with your search words. Try it.

I can't get rid of the smiley face because : and P make

===

[ Mod-edit: I got rid of the smiley face, by changing the ':' character to [SIZE="2"]:[/SIZE]. SIZE="2" is the default, so that SIZE markup does nothing, except to keep the smiley face detector from seeing a : next a P. -- Paul. ]

[LivioRazlo]

Google's search engine is infinitely more powerful than what most people are led to believe. I only know this because I have used it a time or two for computer network penetration testing...

If you have the time, this 100+ page PowerPoint presentation gives you all the information you'll ever need to "hack" Google's search engine: Google Hacks

Here is a copy of Google Hacking for Penetration Testers for any of my inquisitive friends: Google Hacking for Penetration Testers

[Ewan]

Mozilla Firefox has a little Add-on called TinEye which adds a right-click context menu item to search for instances of a particular image. Can be handy to locate larger images for instance.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/fir...-image-search/

[Guest]

This is a link from github if downloading TOR is blocked in your country.

https://github.com/TheTorProject/gettorbrowser

[looking-glass]

Been trying to use search engines to search for when a certain phrase appeared on the internet. I am aware some allow you to specify last 24hr, week, month etc.

However can't seem to find one that does e.g. from 1990 to 1995.

Closest I got to this was playing with this:

"https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22Insurgent+populists%22&tbs=cdr:1,cd_mi n:2/1/1960,cd_max:2/10/1970&gws_rd=cr&ei=2sOdWKG0LujOgAbN-6XwAQ"

The 'speech' marks I just addded for this posting.

So I change 'Insurgent+populists' and the date variables, but don't know what all the other stuff is at the end.

I have had limited success with this, but not on that specific search.

Any suggestions please?

[RunningDeer]

Posted by looking-glass (here)
BAny suggestions please?

Try this: type in the search box ’Insurgency+populist+1990-1995’

Scroll to the bottom “Goooooooooogle”, then click on the oldest pages of your search.

[Bill Ryan]

Posted by looking-glass (here)
Any suggestions please?

I'd suggest

• Tools > [Any Time ] > Custom Range

Like this:

[RunningDeer]

Posted by Bill Ryan (here)
I'd suggest

I wasn’t aware of that one. There’s a ‘custom range’ that’ll narrow it down.

UPDATE: Huh? I was on a different timeline. I didn't see the same post as presented up yonder with 'custom range'. FEEL FREE TO DELETE THIS POST

1) Search: Insurgent+populist

tools, then custom range

2) plug in date range

3) Date range appears close to the top.

[looking-glass]

Many Thanks Bill,

I've been avoiding google, so usuallly try not to use javascript on that site, plus another few 'filter' that hopefully limit/ prevent farming.

Anyhow, just used your tutorial, turned on js (briefly) and it worked.

EDIT: just had to remind myself to delete cookies after I use that site