DuckDuckGo dorks for searching for information in messaging apps
Many messaging apps offer features for creating public channels, groups and chats. A wealth of information on a wide range of topics is posted in them, but it can be difficult - or impossible - to find using the apps’ built-in search. Fortunately, some of it is still indexed by search engines.
Here’s a short article with examples of how to search for content on WhatsApp, Discord, WeChat, LINE, Snapchat, KakaoTalk and Telegram.
Why isn’t today’s article about Google?
Just 5-10 years ago, Google dorks for messaging apps and social media worked very well and made it possible to find plenty of information useful for investigations. In recent years, though, all combinations of advanced search operators have been working less and less well. But… they still work, and you can still find a few things.
You can find lots of examples of using Google to search for information about a person in this article:
5 tricks for searching for information by full name on Google
We also have a detailed guide to finding content on Telegram:
Tips and tricks for searching for information on Telegram using Google
In every article, we remind readers that the most important thing when searching on Google is not to limit yourself to Google alone. For example, Telegram is indexed very well by Yandex. But Google is very important too.
When searching other messaging apps, sometimes Google doesn’t find anything at all.
DuckDuckGo, by contrast, returns dozens of relevant results.
And while Google has been disappointing users more and more often lately (just look at the news that it’s disabling inurl:, which still works from time to time), DuckDuckGo, on the other hand, keeps getting better and better.
So, in this article, I’ll show examples of searches using DuckDuckGo. But, just as with Google, the first rule of searching with DuckDuckGo is not to limit yourself to it - try different search engines.
DuckDuckGo advanced search operators
In this search, you can use four of the most useful advanced search operators for OSINT investigations (as well as vulnerability hunting):
filetype:pdf
Searches exclusively for files of a specific type. You can replace pdf with pdf, doc(x), xls(x), ppt(x) or html. DuckDuckGo indexes all these file types.
intitle:osint
Replace “osint” with any other word. This operator searches for the word only in web page titles.
inurl:osint
Searches only within page URLs. This lets you search for specific types of pages (such as user profiles) or particular sections of a website.
site:facebook.com
Searches for a specific domain or subdomain.
And using just these four operators, you can do all sorts of amazing things (see the examples below).
You can read more about advanced search syntax in the Official Documentation.
Let’s try to find public WhatsApp groups using the keyword OSINT:
site:chat.whatsapp.com osint
A couple of dozen links appeared in the results, but unfortunately the group names aren’t visible, so they have to be checked manually. The quickest way to do this is to open the web version of WhatsApp in another tab.
And if you need to find something in the WhatsApp Business Directory (pages for small businesses such as cafés and shops), you need to search the wa.me domain:
site:wa.me bakery
Discord
Discord content is hardly indexed by search engines at all, but you can search for Discord server invite links across various websites, blogs and forums:
join "discord.gg” osint
WeChat/Tencent (QQ)
Perhaps some readers have never even heard of it. But it’s an immensely popular Chinese messaging platform with almost 1.5 billion users.
As with other messaging apps, WeChat lets you create themed channels and subscribe to them. This is made possible by Tencent Guilds, a platform hosted on the pd.qq.com subdomain.
You can search for posts in channels by keyword using the following query:
site:pd.qq.com osint
But WeChat is more than just topic-based channels: it’s an entire universe of different services that would require a separate, long article.
You can search across the whole qq.com domain and hide platforms you don’t need from the search results using the search operator “-”. For example, here’s a query that excludes news and books:
site:qq.com -news -weread
Telegram
As mentioned above, there was a separate article about Telegram on the Noimosiny blog. The examples in it also work on DuckDuckGo:
site:t.me osint
But in my subjective opinion, Google and Yandex still return more channels for highly specialised topics. The results differ across all three search engines, though, so it’s worth trying them all for an in-depth search.
LINE
Another platform that is little known in Europe but hugely popular in Asia (particularly Japan), with hundreds of millions of users. And, as with WeChat, the messaging app comes with an entire ecosystem of different services and platforms.
site:line.me smith
A simple search of the Line domain can find mentions of a name or keyword across many different pages. Also consider whether it might be worth translating your query from English into Japanese and other languages.
Snapchat
A very popular messaging app in the US (with over 70 million users) and India (with over 100 million users). It’s particularly handy because it lets you search directly by keywords in profile names and descriptions:
site:snapchat.com/add/ smith
KakaoTalk
Compared with the other messaging apps in this article, this platform isn’t very popular (with just around 50 million users). Most of its users are in South Korea, and it’s one of the main OSINT resources in the country. Public profiles of individuals and companies can be found on the subdomain pf.kakao.com.
site:pf.kakao.com smith
Conclusion
This article shows the simplest examples of searching for information in messaging apps. I think that by experimenting with the operators “site:”, “inurl:” and “intitle:”, you can come up with many other queries suited to the aims of your investigation.
I would also like to emphasise that we have only discussed the most popular messaging apps, but many countries have their own local messaging apps and social platforms, which are also indexed by Google, so this list could be extended.
While searching for information in messaging apps, you are sure to come across usernames, email addresses and phone numbers. You can link this data to accounts on different platforms and gather further information about them using Noimosiny search.