Gary Marshall: 25 Google search tips and tricks you need to know

TechRadar: All latest feeds Gary Marshall: 25 Google search tips and tricks you need to know

Everybody knows Google, but not everybody knows its secrets, the little things that make finding what you want faster, that make searches more specific and that uncover entertaining Easter eggs.

Here are 25 of our favourite ways to find Google's G spots.

1. Use search operators

Google does a pretty good job of working out what you're looking for, but the more specific you are the better your results will be.

Using operators does just that, so for example enclosing a phrase in quotation marks - "like this" - searches for that specific phrase, adding a minus sign excludes that word (salsa recipe -tomatoes) and using OR gives Google a choice, eg. World Cup location 2014 or 2022.

2. Search a single site

You can restrict your search to a single website by using the site: operator, so for example if you wanted to look for Android content on TechRadar you might type android site:techradar.com.

3. Get definitions

The define: operator, as you might expect, gives you definitions - so define:search gives you the dictionary definition of search and synonyms such as hunt, look, scout and dig.

4. Do sums and currency conversions

You probably already know that Google will carry out sums if you type them in the search box - 4*15 gives you 60, 2*2*3*4 gives you 48 and an on-screen calculator and so on - but it can also convert units and currencies. convert 200 usd to gbp converts dollars to pounds, and you can also convert measurements such as distance, weight and temperature.

5. Get essential info, fast

Need to chase your love interest to the airport? You can quickly check the details on Google

Type weather and you'll see the current conditions and a seven-day forecast; add the name of a town to get the weather report from a different location. Type flight BA1491 to see the status of a flight, time New York to see the local time in that location, sunrise London to see when the sun's coming up or GOOG to see Google's stock information.

6. Search by location

If you type a generic term such as "Italian restaurant", Google will show you results in and around your current location along with a map showing where they are. If you'd rather be more specific, enter the postcode at the end of your query - so for example fish and chips BA1 2BW shows the chippies in and around central Bath.

7. Filter your image search

Image search often throws up seemingly unrelated pictures, so filter your searches

Some terms produce all kinds of search results, so for example an image search for "heather" brings you plants, Heather Graham and Heather from EastEnders. Google will offer to filter those results for you - so for example our search for heather gives us the options "plant", "flower", "eastenders", "scottish" and so on.

You can use the Search Tools button to filter by size, colour, type - such as photos of people or illustrations, time and whether you can use the photos without payment. Remember your operators too: heather -graham produces a screen full of Heathers but no Heather Graham.

8. See sites that aren't online

Google's cache keeps copies of sites it's looked at, so if they're down you can still see them by using the cache: operator - so cache:techradar.com would display TechRadar if for some reason our server wasn't working. The same operator can sometimes catch sneaky "ninja edits", where sites correct appalling, offensive or hilarious mistakes: you'll often find the uncorrected original in the cache.

9. See what's on

Fancy a film? movie times Glasgow tells you what's on in that particular city, and if you use a specific cinema name such as movie times Odeon Quay you'll see what's on in that particular cinema.

10. Use your voice

If you're using Chrome, Android or the Google iOS app, you can search by voice: press or click on the microphone icon and tell Google what you're looking for.

11. Check spellings

Not sure how to spell something? Type it into the search box and unless you really mangle it, Google will show you the correct spelling, its definition, and synonyms you might find easier to spell.

12. Filter your web search

If you click on Search Tools you'll see four filtering options: the country, so for example here in the UK you can search anywhere or limit your results to UK websites; the date and/or time of publication, ranging from the last hour to the last year; by reading level; and whether Google should use your current location.

13. Find out what links to what

It's easy to discover who's linking to your site, or to any other page you want to know about: just use the link: operator. link:techradar.com tells you who's linking to us.

14. Find similar sites

Here's another handy operator: related. This one helps you find pages that are similar to one you already know about, so for example related:techradar.com tells you about our sister site T3 and some of our rivals.

15. Get nutritional information

What a surprise - bacon isn't as healthy as tofu

Some food-related searches will display nutritional information, so looking for chocolate cake will display the calories, nutrients, vitamins and fat in a typical recipe. Where it gets clever is when you tell Google to compare things, such as compare apples and oranges or compare bacon and tofu.

http://rss.feedsportal.com/c/669/f/9809/s/3d5c1352/sc/4/l/0L0Stechradar0N0Cus0Cnews0Cinternet0C250Ehandy0Egoogle0Esearch0Etips0Eand0Etricks0E1260A8230Dsrc0Frss0Gattr0Fall/story01.htm

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How to hack the net-connected home

BBCTech How to hack the net-connected home

The more connected a home is the more ways there are to get at data within it

There are intruders in your home, ones that came with claims that they would make your life easier, that they could take over some of the drudgery so you could pursue some of life's finer pleasures.

What they did not mention was that they would let strangers look around your home and spill your secrets to anyone who asks the right questions.

These are not people letting you down, they are smart gadgets that will form what is known as the Internet of Things. All of them are a security disaster waiting to happen, suggests a BBC experiment.

The Internet of Things (IoT) stands in contrast to The Internet of People we currently enjoy and which lets us communicate and connect via a myriad of different technologies. The IoT promises to let stuff, devices and gadgets connect in the same way to both other hardware and us.

Via the IoT, those gadgets will tell us how they feel and we will control them via the same routes. Already it is possible to get smart thermostats, fridges, ovens, washing machines, air conditioners, lights, plugs, music players, baby monitors and many more.

Smart gadgets are better than dumb ones, say enthusiasts, because the ability to control them remotely will help us cope with the uncertainties of modern life.

With a net-connected oven, it will be possible to ensure your casserole is cooked to perfection as you arrive home hours late rather than dried up and cold because there was no way to communicate with the oven and adjust its timer.

The BBC's experiment brought together seven computer security experts who have been looking into so-called smart gadgets to find out how many they could subvert.

And how many could they crack the security on?

All of them.

"With most of them, if you can connect to it you can own it," said James Lyne, head of security research at Sophos.

Holey home

The BBC set up a house filled with a variety of smart gadgets and asked researchers to demonstrate how easy it was to crack the security systems on them.

Liam Hagan, a researcher from security firm Nettitude, said he was "shocked" at the poor job baby monitors and wi-fi cameras did to protect the pictures and sounds they were gathering.

"One of the big issues is that one wi-fi video camera makes itself available to the internet regardless of your firewall," he said. "Anyone who knows your IP address would be greeted with the login screen for the camera."

With one camera he tested, entering a default login name and password granted access to the images and sounds the device was capturing. There was no prompt to change these credentials to protect privacy, he said.

The days of dumb gadgets that cannot connect to the net could be numbered

Statistics gathered via the Shodan search engine, which catalogues devices and industrial equipment attached to the net, suggests there are more than 120,000 of just this one poorly protected gadget online already.

It was hard to know how many were giving strangers a look into homes up and down the country, he said, as there was no legal and ethical way to probe them.

The vulnerabilities in the device emerge from the very basic web server software it uses to post images online. That insecure software is currently being used by more than five million gadgets that are also already online.

More worryingly, he said, one wi-fi camera he tested had what is known as a "cross site scripting" vulnerability that lets an attacker inject their own code on to the device. This, said Mr Hagan, could be used to turn the video camera into a sniffer that could look for what else was on the network and let an attacker "pivot" to other more interesting systems such as PCs, smartphones and tablets.

Researchers from the NCC Group managed to take control of several different devices including smart plugs that can be controlled via wi-fi, a wireless music system and a blu-ray DVD player.

Felix Ingram, from the NCC, said vulnerabilities in a widely used networking system called UPnP helped his team take control of these devices.

UPnP was known to be vulnerable and kits already exist, one of which was written by an NCC researcher, that look for devices that use the networking protocol and try different vulnerabilities against them.

Many of the devices used UPnP to reach servers out on the wider net potentially exposing them to attackers. Built-in passwords that could not be changed made these ripe for exploitation, he said.

Gaining control of these devices was likely to annoy people more than anything else, said Mr Ingram, but other work by the company had exposed a more worrying aspect.

"The one that people really get concerned about is the microphone on a smart TV," he said. "We were able to bug a living room through it."

"That's when the internet of things starts to spook people out," he said. "when your stuff does more than you think it does or ever wanted it to."

Safety first

Mr Lyne from Sophos said, at the moment, the danger smart gadgets exposed people to was fairly small. However, he added, trends in computer crime suggest it might not stay that way.

Cyber-thieves have started ransomware campaigns as it gets harder to attack PC operating systems

The work that Microsoft and other PC software vendors were doing to harden their code was already making dedicated cyber criminals look elsewhere for targets. This, he said, explained the rise in ransomware, technical support scams and attacks on computers at checkout points in shops.

The "ridiculously easy" way it was possible to subvert many smart gadgets was likely to make them a candidate for attack in the near future, he said. There had already been examples of attackers looking to subvert domestic hardware in a bid to grab online banking data.

Mr Lyne called on manufacturers to "step up" and do a better job of securing their products. In many cases, he said, there was no easy way to update the insecure firmware on these gadgets to fix the bugs researchers are finding. And, he added, many might be reluctant to apply them for fear of "bricking" the camera, washing machine or TV altogether.

He realised that there might be cost and usability implications for improving security but said it would not take much effort or cash to harden many products.

"There's a continuum between security and usability and it's true that the more you secure something there is a cost in how usable it is," he said. "At the moment, however, we are a long way off the wrong end of that scale."

Fixing many of the most obvious flaws on many devices would not hit usability at all, he said, because it would affect parts invisible to customers and users.

The BBC would like to thank Felix Ingram, Eleanor Chapman and George Hafiz from the NCC Group, James Lyne from Sophos, and Rowland Johnson and Liam Hagan from Nettitude for their help with this story

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-27373328#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa

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Inspired by Petri but it didn’t quite work for me so I went to TechNet which was helpful.  Article here:  http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh529943(v=exchg.141).aspx