Method for searching for email addresses on Google

Question

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 [email protected] 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 [email protected] is better, but its still subject to false positives.

Lately, I've been trying ([email protected]) and it seems to be a huge improvement over the other two.

Answer 1

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 ([email protected]) 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 [email protected], 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.

Answer 2

Google recently introduced Verbatim Search that solves this problem:

Answer 3

Try searching the email address as a phrase: ["[email protected]"] returns even fewer false positives than the method you suggested using parentheses. Unfortunately I haven't yet figured out how to exclude the matches on tips+adam... ;-)

Answer 4

If you are referring to search for emails within Google Mail... then you could try use the operators built into Gmail such as: "from:[email protected]" or "to:[email protected]"