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photo by Ehsan Shafiei

September 11, 2026

Getting Started with OSINT: Google Dorking Part 2 More Useful Search Operators

In the first part, I covered some of the very basic Google Dorking operators.

By Ehsan shafiei

2 min read

For this part, I want to go a little further and talk about some operators that are more useful when you want to narrow down your search and get more specific results.

1. intitle:

The first operator is intitle:

This operator searches for a word inside the title of a webpage.

For example:

intitle:python

This will return pages that have the word python in their title.

If you want to search for a phrase instead of a single word, you can use double quotes:

intitle:"Artificial Intelligence"

This is useful when you already know what topic you want to see in the title of the page.

2. ext:

The second operator is ext:

It is short for extension and lets you search for a specific file type.

For example:

ext:pdf

I use this a lot when I want to find books, papers, reports, or other documents.

It is also useful for finding datasets because a lot of data is stored in spreadsheet files.

For example:

ext:xlsx

So if you are looking for a dataset related to a specific topic, you can combine the topic with the file extension and get more useful results.

3. intext:

The third operator is intext:

This one searches inside the text of webpages.

For example:

intext:"Artificial Intelligence"

This helps when you want Google to look for a phrase inside the actual content of a page.

Combining These Operators

The useful part is that these operators can be combined with the operators from the first post.

For example, in one of my current projects I need papers about AI and diabetes.

Instead of just searching for AI and diabetes, I can use:

(intitle:AI OR intitle:"Artificial intelligence") AND intitle:"diabetes" ext:pdf

This gives me results that are much closer to what I actually need:

  • AI or Artificial Intelligence in the title
  • Diabetes in the title
  • PDF files only

This is one of the things I like about Google Dorking. You can start with very simple operators and then combine them to make the search much more specific.

4. Searching in a Number Range

Another useful feature is searching inside a number range.

If you want to search for a range from 2000 to 2025, you can put two dots between the numbers:

2000..2025

This tells Google to look for results related to numbers inside that range.

I use this a lot when I am looking for things like years or even phone numbers :))

Just be careful with how much you use some of these searches because Google may temporarily block or limit your searches if you send too many unusual queries.

5. inurl:

Another useful operator is inurl:

This searches for a word or phrase inside the URL.

For example:

inurl:security

This is especially useful when you are looking for domains, pages, or URLs related to a specific topic.

You can also combine it with other operators to make the search more specific.

6. after: and before:

The last operators I want to mention are after: and before:

These are useful when you want to limit results based on date.

For example:

after:2024-11-21

or:

before:2024-11-21

The date is written in the YYYY-MM-DD format.

You can also use both together:

after:2024-01-01 before:2024-12-31

This helps when you only want results from a specific period.

Final Thoughts

I tried to cover the main Google Dorking operators across these posts.

There are many more operators and different ways to use them. Some of them do not work anymore, and some only work when you use them in a specific way.

There are also other techniques, like searching based on location, but that topic needs more explanation and is probably better for another post.

For now, this is the last part of my Google Dorking series.

I will try to write more about other OSINT techniques and tools when I get the time.