Friday, August 11, 2006
The Search for Secret Google Services
Tony Ruscoe is a web developer working for a translation company in Sheffield, UK. He’s interested in translation technology, genealogy and Google.
Since stumbling across Google
Base almost a month before its release and more recently uncovering
some more secret Google services,
several people have asked how I go about finding these new services. By way
of a response, here’s a quick guide to just some of the many different ways
you could use to try and find new services that Google are working on.
1. Finding a new service
The details of new services can sometimes be leaked accidentally. Other
times, they’re kept secret right up until their release. Here are a few
things to look out for if you want to discover new services before anyone
outside the Googleplex has even heard about them:
- New domain names
While Google tends to use their google.com domain to host new
services, they often register new domain names well in advance of new
services being released in order to stop domain cybersquatters snapping them
up first. Gary Price has made a couple
of posts about
this recently. Whilst reverse DNS lookups can help, don’t get
fooled into thinking that Google
owns all the domain names that are resolving to
its IP address ranges or servers. New domains can sometimes give useful
hints about new services but can’t be relied upon. (Google has owned
GBrowser.com for years, yet we still
haven’t seen an official release.)
- New subdomains
When I found the base.google.com subdomain, I
simply used a script and a large list of around 65,000 English words to send
requests in the format *.google.com to see which ones resolved. It’s
probably also worth checking subdomains in the format of *.l.google.com
as sometimes these are active well before the normal
subdomain, as Garett Rogers pointed out when he found the
writely.l.google.com subdomain was resolving back in June 2006
(whereas the writely.google.com subdomain still doesn’t resolve at
the time of writing this).
- New subfolders
Google has also been known to just use subfolders instead of
subdomains when launching new services, including Google
Notebook.
Using a similar word list technique as I did for sniffing out subdomains,
you could query all Google’s domains and subdomains for new subfolders. Be
warned though – if you send too many requests to Google’s servers in a short
period of time, you may get temporarily blocked!
- New Google Account service names
Back in May, I tried a new approach to finding new services. I’d
noticed that services requiring a Google Account used a series of similar
URLs for creating new accounts and signing in. By appending various words to
the end of these pages – i.e.
https://www.google.com/accounts/Login?service= – I was able to find
several new services such as Google Weaver (known back then as M Scrapbook),
Google RS2, SSD, Mobile Download Console and LH2 (now known to be Picasa Web
Albums). More recently, I tried a similar approach with the sandbox.google.com version of Google Accounts and found even more
services ,
which Google swiftly removed. (I try to maintain a list of these Google
Account service
names on my
website.)
- Clues in JavaScript / HTML code
Another technique often
used by Garett
Rogers involves sifting through the
JavaScript source code used by Google services such as Gmail and Google
Calendar. This can reveal new domains, subdomains, links, labels and other
hints at new services or features for existing services.
- Changes to Google’s robots.txt files
Google try their best to not
index their own SERPs, so when they create a new service that could clutter
up their index, they’ll usually add a new entry to their
robots.txt file. (One of the most
recent additions to the file was
www.google.com/call, as Garett Rogers
discovered.)
By scheduling a simple script, you could easily monitor this file and be
alerted of any changes. Don’t forget that each Google domain and
subdomain may have its own robots.txt file, so to do this thoroughly
you would need to monitor all those for changes too!
- Changes to Blogger profile pages
Since Google don’t use standard naming conventions for their official
blogs, it’s hard to detect when a new official blog has been created. One of
the best (if not only) ways to check if a blog is official is to see whether
it appears on any Blogger profiles belonging to Googlers (such as Eric
Case, for example). Quite
often, the titles of new official Google blogs appear on these profiles
pages before they (or their related services) are officially released.
Monitoring these pages for changes could give clues about the names of any
new services.
2. Waiting for the new service to be released
Once a new service is discovered, everyone always wants to be the first to
confirm a sighting and post exclusive screenshots. Here’s what you can do if
you’re expecting a service to be released:
- New logos and images
Sometimes it’s possible to discover new services by making educated
guesses about the image and logo URLs. Logos often follow similar naming
conventions, which makes it easier to guess the location of a new service
logo once you already know the name. (This technique can also be used to
find new Google holiday logos.)
- New support pages
Sometimes Google puts the support pages online before releasing a
service. Since the Google Help URLs
often follow similar conventions, it’s relatively easy to check a few
URL combinations to see if the new service’s help pages are online.
- Updates to other pages
Sometimes, Google starts rolling out new services by quietly adding
links to various pages, in particular Google Labs,
the More Google products page and the
Google Site Map page. By
monitoring these pages for updates, you could be one of the first to know
when a new service has been released, meaning you could be one of the first
to sign up (before the number of signups get restricted) and get those all
important screenshots if the service is taken offline again!
3. What to do once you find something new
When Corsin Camichel snooped around the Google servers, he accidentally hit on Google Platypus aka Gdrive (and took a screenshot, of course).
Even if you’ve not followed the previous steps, Google sometimes adds
references and links to pages either accidentally or without announcing
them. This is what you should do if you see something new:
- Take plenty of screenshots
Google has been known to make new services and features live for short
periods of time before removing them again. If you find something new, make
sure you take screenshots of all the pages you can find in case the pages
disappear again.
- Make copies of the source code
Screenshots are great but they only show you what’s on the surface. By
saving the HTML and JavaScript source code, you will be able to search for
any references to other new services even if Google take the new service
offline. (Analyzing links and code for new services shortly after release
can also sometimes reveal “secret” URLs that were meant only for testing and
these can be useful in discovering new services in the future.)
- Let others know about what you’ve found
No matter how thorough you think you may have been, someone else will
probably be able to find something you didn’t. By sharing your findings, you
can help others find out even more about the new services. If you have a
blog, make a post about your findings including any screenshots you managed
to grab. (And don’t forget to email
Philipp Lenssen or create a thread in the Google Blogoscoped Forum!)
And here endeth the lesson. Others will probably have their own ways of
doing things and new methods will emerge all the time.
Of course, you could just try bribing a Googler or one of their ’Trusted
Tester’ friends... [added: Just kidding!!]
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