A new google hack: defeating unaccessible directories...

Haven't you ever been poking around a website after having arrived there due to a particularly-tasty peice of information only to be stymied by directory-listing denied 403 errors and the like? Well, at least for highly linked-to documents, I've found a rough way around that using a simple Google hack.

For example, I was googling and ran across an interesting tid bit on the CA Secretary of State's page: "Report on Secretary of State Testing of Diebold PCM 500 Units". That's all good and well, but what honeypot does this paper sit inside of? So I try:

[http://www.ss.ca.gov/elections/ks_dre_papers/](https://web.archive.org/web/20051123152904/http://www.ss.ca.gov/elections/ks_dre_papers/)

Damn. 403 error. But wait, Google can probably help... because I would be satisfied to see just a list of Googlified URLs that point to things in this ks_dre_papers honeypot. So, I go to Google and enter:

[site:www.ss.ca.gov inurl:ks_dre_papers](https://web.archive.org/web/20051123152904/http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=site%3Awww.ss.ca.gov+inurl%3Aks_dre_papers&btnG=Google+Search)

Low and behold! All sorts of goodies! Note, what I did was use the inurl: Google specifier to tell Google that I want only URLs that contain ks_dre_papers (the site: one restricts it to the Secretary of State's website).