Tuesday, April 12, 2005

Hacking Google to find people , mp3 , webcams , map

Google is really a powerful search engine ,over the years it has become a really essential tool to me as a developer and internet enthusiat. If ever I need to search for anything on the net I am 90% sure am gonna get what I want if I go to Google. But I am really suprised that many people dont know how to perform queries in google to get information that they need.This article is going to help them getting started in learning how to unleash the powers of Google.

Finding People
Finding people is quiet easy if you want to search for someone you should first know his/her full name or nickname. You go to google you type "Javed Mandary" (with the quotes)would return you all the pages having the name Javed Mandary. In my case however since am indexed a lot by Google if you simply type Javed would return you results on me (right now on the first page ..but that varies considerably). Of course you must hope that the person you are trying to find is someone who participates in forums or writes up articles or simply blogs , that person needs to have net presence to be found.

Finding files / mp3s
This is where the fun parts starts , why use illegal software to download music files (Kazaa , Sheraza , etc..) whilst you can ask google to find it for you. This is how i go about doing it. What you need to know is that many people share music publicly over the internet , google being such as powerful crawler can indentity these pages and return it back to you. Say you want a song called 'a day in paradiso' from artist 'phil' and you want the file in mp3 format. In google type the following commands and see the results that are returned:
"Index of" a day in paradiso ".mp3"
"Index of" paradiso phil ".mp3" "size"

Of course the example I gave above is fictionous , so i would doubt that you get a real result but you can change the artist and song title with real song information. If you want the song in wma or ogg format just substitute the .mp3 part with .wma or .ogg .

The same could be done to search for different types of files on the net may it be video , audio , pdf , powerpoint etc..

For more detailed information as to how to find mp3s please see the following article: http://www.i-hacked.com/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=128


Finding Public Webcams
Some webcams can be viewed over the internet as they are publicly available the following article shows how to find these webcams : http://www.i-hacked.com/content/view/81/42/

There are a host of other functinalites that can be obtained using google , for example using google map you can literally hack it into creating your own map with your own markings , add video , pictures and other multimedia information to your own customed made google map. Engadget has a walkthrough of how to do this and here is a wiki for those of you who really want to dig futher into it.

There is also a book which is out called Google Hacking for Penetration Testers which shows what can be done with the search engine.

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