Google Advanced Search

We can use Google for passive information gathering purposes. This method is a passive one, the target site doesn't know about our reconnaissance. The Google search engine provides a decent set of special directives for refining the search results to suit our needs. The directives are in the following format:

directive:query

These directives can be very profitable for searching juicy resources for a target. As an example, let's do an advanced Google search on packtpub.com that will list all indexed PDF files:

ext:pdf site:packtpub.com
Google Advanced Search

In this advanced search, we utilized the ext:pdf directive to only obtain files ending with ...

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