Google has been given credit for many things in the last couple of years. I’m going to mention one that was on /. which is that it is the final nail in the coffin of “security through obscurity”. If it is online, someone will find it. It is up to you, the intrepid tester, to do it first.

Lets say your product has a certain “magic” value that could be traced back to your product

  • allinurl: — returns results with in the url
  • allintext: — returns results with somewhere in the text of the page (remember, not all text is rendered in a browser, but the spiders don’t care
  • allintitle: — returns results with in the title

More information on these can be found at Advanced Operators and Google Cheat Sheet.

The only problem is that this method of testing requires a certain critical mass to be truly effective. If you only have 2 customers, the Google spiders might not have found them yet. However, if you have 20 or more, likely you have gotten your reference count up to the point where they know about you.

I wonder how I could work “Advanced knowledge of Google” into my resume.