How To Search Like A Spy: Google's Secret Hacks Revealed

The National Security Agency just declassified a bulky 643 pages research guidebook called Untangling the Web: A Guide to Internet Research (PDF) that doesn't appear all that interesting. That is, except for one section on page 73: "Google Hacking."

"Say you're a cyberspy for the NSA and you want sensitive inside information on companies in South Africa," explains Kim Zetter at Wired. "What do you do?"

Well, you could type the following advanced search into Google — "filetype:xls site:za confidential"  to uncover a trove of apparently private spreadsheets. 

How about an Excel file containing Russian passwords? Try: "filetype:xls site:ru login."

Declassified information being what it is, though, some of the search tips can appear a little dated.

And even if keyboard espionage isn't really your thing, the document contains a number of practical tips anyone can use to become a better Googler:

* Adding a tilde (~) immediately before a term will search for its synonyms. For example: "Scary ~animals" will also search for "scary creatures," etc.

* Repeating a word will help you find more relevant hits. For example a search for "java coffee coffee coffee" will cut down on the results about the programming language.

* You can use Google wildcard (*) to replace a term in a query if you don't know exactly what you're searching for. For example: "Sacramento is the * of California."

Testing Google Now Functionality to the Google Home Page for Android

Google is on its way to test “Google Now” functionality to Google home page. This functionality will soon available for android users and Google Glass users. 

Google Now will help you to get information you want to see and right when you want to see it. 

For example, if you are in the airport, Google Now would show you the gate information. If you are about to leave for work, Google Now would show you traffic and driving directions.

Google Announced Quick View Badge Field Experimentation in Google Mobile Search

Today Google announced a new Google field trial experiment for a feature they’ve been quietly testing named Quick View.

The Google Quick View badge is found on a select number of sites when a searcher uses Google Mobile search from their Smartphone. The feature is currently working for Wikipedia on searches done in English on Google.com. It basically will give you an almost instant view of the Wikipedia page when clicked on.

Google says the Quick View will show you the Wikipedia page “immediately.”

Do not Add Too Many Pages Too Quickly on Your Website

Google’s Matt Cutts replied a question putted forward by another Googler, John Mueller, on YouTube asking, “Should I add an archive of hundreds of thousands of pages all at once or in stages?”

The question is, if you build out a new section of your website with masses of content – is it safe to just launch them all at once or should you do smaller break apart at a time?

Matt Cutts said that if a site released hundreds of thousands of pages suddenly, it may raise a red flag and stipulate a manual review by the Google spam team. And if you do not want Google to manually review your site and you don’t want to draw attention to your site; you may not want to release too many pages too quickly. Matt said that if you can slowly roll them out in larger blocks but not all of them at once, then do it that way. If not, it should be fine, but someone at Google may manually review it. He also added that it is rare to see a site release so many new pages and for all those pages to all be unique and of good quality. He didn’t say it was impossible.

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Google Webmasters Tool Removes ‘Not Selected’ Option

Google has confirmed the news of the exclusion of the “not selected” filter from Google Webmaster Tool’s Index Status report because it Google believes that this option was causing confusion than actually helping webmasters with their sites.

Earlier, the “not selected” would signify either:

•  It redirects to another page
•  It has a rel=”canonical” to another page
•  Our algorithms have detected that its contents are substantially similar to another URL and picked the other URL to symbolize the content.