Google-search – Method for searching for email addresses on Google

google-search

How should I be googling for an email address in a way that minimizes false positives (while avoiding false negatives)?

That is, just searching the email address isn't enough, since you end up with a lot of false positives.

For example, searching Adam@lifehacker.com doesn't really give conclusive results, since Google doesn't treat the @ as a string-preserving character. (I'm using the email address of the editor of Lifehacker as an example, since its publicly available, ie on the Lifehacker sidebar.)

Searching Adam@lifehacker.com is better, but its still subject to false positives.

Lately, I've been trying (adam@lifehacker.com) and it seems to be a huge improvement over the other two.

Best Answer

For this particular example, I think the best query is:

("adam lifehacker com") +"adam lifehacker com" -"tips adam lifehacker com"

  • I excluded the punctuation since it isn't indexed by Google (although now that I think about it, it might be better to leave it in in case Google ever does add this functionality).
  • In this case we know one of the false positives (tips+adam@lifehacker.com) so I excluded it using the - operator. However, it still does match it on some pages.
  • The next thing I did was add the + operator, which should guarantee that the keywords exist on the actual page (and not only in a page that links to it). This would especially be useful if you are including other keywords in your search.
  • I also repeated the email address, which I believe is the most effective change I made. This should let Google know that it's an important keyword in your search, and it eliminates many of the pages from the results. I haven't checked which pages are eliminated, but I'm guessing it's most of the false positives.
  • The last thing I did was use that particular order of keywords. If you try the query +"adam lifehacker com" ("adam lifehacker com") -"tips adam lifehacker com" instead, you will get an extra 100 results, so you can try different orders of keywords (see the previous link for more information about this feature).

Another thing I tried, which didn't work, was using " adam lifehacker com" in hopes of it not matching tips+adam@lifehacker.com, but it simply ignored the whitespace.

Apparently the * operator must match a single word, however I'm not sure how that can help cause when you do something like "adam lifehacker com" -(tips * adam lifehacker com) for example, the - sign in front of the parenthesis doesn't work. Plus, I believe it still matches zero words even though the cheat sheet says it doesn't.

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