Search Engines
The majority of OSINT work revolves around search engines of various types. This tutorial will walk you through the purposes of various search engines and expand your toolbox. Some of these search engines may have no apparent use to you now, and that may very well be true. Thw purpose of this tutorial is so that you will be able to remember them when you do actually need them again.
Website Search Engines
These are the search engines you would use every day, except maybe with a minor twist.
Google
Google is your standard search engine. It has probably indexed the more of the websites on the internet of all the search engines. But because it tries to guess what you want according to your interests, location, etc, it may not give you the results you seek. However, Google has a very powerful Advanced Search function that can help you narrow down searches.
Google can be found at www.google.com.
DuckDuckGo
One of DuckDuckGo's features is privacy. Because they promise not to track you, their search results are profile-independent. In other words, they won't guess what you want to see and filter out results according to your online activity. DuckDuckGo is also capable of searching the dark web as well as the surface web, though surface web results usually overtake the results from the dark web in the overall search results.
DuckDuckGo can be found at duckduckgo.com.
Million Short
Million Short is a search engine that is like Google except they allow you to remove the most popular sites in search of more obscure results.
Million Short can be found at millionshort.com.
Reverse Image Search Engines
These search engines can be used to find the origin of images or websites relevant to the images.
TinEye
TinEye will return all the websites that have the image you uploaded, as well as the urls of the matching images. It accounts for quality change, picture of pictures, cropping, flipping, and possibly fradulent doctoring.
TinEye can be found at tineye.com.
Google Images
Google Images allows you to upload an image. It will look for similar images, websites, and relevant search terms for further searching.
Google Images can be found at images.google.com.
Exploit Database
Exploit Database will return all the vulnerabilities that match a specific set of search parameters. It is very useful for finding potential exploits that may work on a specific version of some software on some device. It is a crucial tool for finding known vulnerabilities on a server.
Exploit Database can be found at www.exploit-db.com.
IoT Search Engine
These search engines scan all the possible IPs and ports on the internet to document all the Internet-connected devices. It indexes the ips, ports, and banners for you to search.
Shodan
Shodan can be found at www.shodan.io.
Censys
Censys can be found at censys.io.
Niche Search Engines
These are search engines dedicated to finding niche things on the open internet.
can be found at .
MAMONT
MAMONT is a search engine that documents all the open FTP servers and their files.
MAMONT can be found at www.mmnt.ru/int/.
Grayhat Warfare
Grayhat Warfare provides two search services.
Their first search services finds all the files in open s3 Amazon Web Services buckets. This will allow you to possibly find exposed and sensitive data on poorly configured buckets.
Greyhat Warfare Bucket Search can be found at buckets.grayhatwarfare.com.
Their second service documents shortened URLs. This allows you to search a shortened URL before you visit it. It also allows you to find private data on protected urls (protected by being impossible-to-guess) that were accidentally exposed by a shortened URL.
Greyhat Warfare URL Shortener Search can be found at shorteners.grayhatwarfare.com.
Advanced Search Options
To effectively find something, you may need to go beyond simply using the right search terms. You can make more specific searches with Google at www.google.com/advanced_search.