Google hacking week : Using Google to “Hack” stuff.

Feb 24

This week it’s ‘Google hacking week’ on Knightwise.com where we are going to show you some fun and interesting things you can do with Google. We sometimes forget that Google’s main mission is to “index the information of the world” and this means that the Google “bots” (little search and index programs) constantly crawl the internet in their never ending quest to gather information and index it in the massive Google database.

The end result is that if you type stuff into Google’s search bar like ” My Little Pownie ” it will cross reference your search with its massive database and bring back some results you can click on. Although searches like these make up 99% of what Google needs to do all day long .. its only the tip of the iceberg of what Google can REALLY do.

If you play your cards right and ask Google the right questions you can find out a whole lot more. And sometimes you will even find stuff that was not meant to be found. You would be amazed at what people throw online (and forget about). Google quietly indexes it all and you have just one thing to do … ask the right questions.

This weeks articles have nothing to do with “Hacking Google” (good luck with that if you want to try) It’s more about realising the power of the biggest search engine in the world … and the blatant disregard for security that people can have when they put stuff online that was never supposed to be found. Stand by as we teach you some interesting Google Search ‘operators’ as they are called.

We are going to kick you off with a nice examples of how you can use a modified Google search string to find some interesting stuff. Later on in the week we will explain the different google “operators” and how you can combine them to find cool stuff.

Here is a very simple one to get you started : Copy and past the search query below into the google search box … and browse random peoples lives by peeking at their iPhone backups. This is not a hack. This is an indexation of information put online BY USERS, indexed by Google .. and found by you.

intitle:”index of” inurl:”iphone”

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Use your smartphone as a portable scanner with Google Drive.

May 22

Remember those old spy movies ? Where the secret agent / spy would walk around with a small camera to quickly snap shots of some ultra secret documents in a momentarily abandoned office ? Remember the suspense as you sat on the edge of your seat yelling “Hurry up” in front of your television ?  Lets face it : Those spies were geekin out hard : In essence they were the first to master the tedious art of scanning documents.

Somewhere along the way we lost our minds because in the late 90″s we had massive flatbed scanners to do the exact same thing. For those of you who still have a scanner : You know its the most idiotic waste of office / desk space that you have ever owned. Scanners are a kind of high tech coaster for whatever crap you stack on top of them. Why ? because you seldom need them and when you do .. Well after an excavation operation to actually find the scanner under that pile of comics, you then have to make sure the document is the right side up, find a free usb port on your pc and you end up cursing and wasting time.

So why not be Mr Spy all over again ? With the 24 megapixel camera on your smartphone its quite easy to snap up a good picture of a document. Now all you need to do is get those secret plans into your administration system. Enter the new Google Drive app on android that comes with a bunch of new features making it easier to digitize that document. It not only saves the snapshot into your Google Drive, but also preforms OCR right in the cloud. Letting you edit copy and paste the text. Compared to scsi cables, flatbed scanners, OCR applications under Windows .. this is quite a nifty tool.

So start using your smartphone (with the new Google Drive app )as your digital wireless scanner and snap up those documents straight away. Feel the urge to print them too ? Take a look at the long forgotten Google Cloud Print and turn those documents in your Google Drive back to ground up pieces of tree.

Links : Google Drive. – Google Cloud print.

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