Ok,
that was how the evil brains turn
the useful search engines into a weapon.
Now let’s have a look at how
can you save yourself if your data
is also unwillingly listed.
1. Password protect your directories
which contains confidential information
or preferably make new directories
with new names and passwords and move
your data to the new locations so
that the link listed in the search
engines can not be used to access
your data.
2. Make create robots.txt file in
the root directory of your web space
and include the names of the directories
which you don’t want to be listed
in search engines listings. So that
the Google and other search engine
bots will not crawl those directories
and this way they will not get listed.
3. Try to avoid putting your confidential
data online as much as possible, because
no matter what somebody says, there
is no perfect protection for anything
that is online. It is often said in
the world of Networking that the only
computer that is safe on the network
is the one which is not connected.
There are other strings as well that
can be very useful to search with
Google. I am writing a little about
the syntax of that too only for the
positive use and knowledge of those
who want to know.
Inurl:YourSearchWord
inurl: lets you search the URLs with
specific words. Suppose if you search
a URL that contains the word "Dog"
you would search the phrase:
Inurl:dog
This will return the results for only
the list of URLs containing the word
Dog.
Site:
This string is used to search for
the sites with a specified domain
name extension. For example .net .com
.uk .mil etc. So if you search for:
Site:net computing
You will get the list of the sites
having .net as the domain name extension
and having the word "computing"
as the search or keyword.
Index of
This option allows you to find the
directory listings of specific folders
on servers. For example if you want
to search the directory listings of
admin folders then:
index.of.admin
This
would give you the directory listings
of admin folders.
Intitle: This
string gives you the ability to search
for html files that have a certain
word or phrase in their titles.
Intitle:your word or phrase
Would show you the listing of those
html files which have "your word
or phrase" in the title.
If you look at all those options,
you will find out that all of them
are basically for positive use. They
help you get more specific results
if you are searching through a search
engine but there are always black
sheep who would try to find out a
negative use for almost everything
that they know. I hope that none of
the readers would use the above information
in any illegal activity. I also request
a direct feedback or comments in email
again for future so that I can improve
myself too. Good Luck!
