A URL research trick

In the previous post I came across two articles by the same author. Here's one of the URLs.

http://www.bgmi.us/web/bdavey/Psychosis.htm

I came across the article while searching for something else and as usual took a little time out to read something that was interesting. It was well worth it as well. These branches out into other information can be lead to new ideas and concepts.

I like what the authors written so I could Google his name however a simple technique using the web address could lead to a gold mine of the authors work. By deleting the file name I can get to the directory of files (this only works on some web pages). In this case it becomes

http://www.bgmi.us/web/bdavey/

And there I uncover

A STRATEGY FOR LOSERS

HELPING THE LAST TO COME FIRST IN THE ECOLOGICAL TRANSFORMATION OF SOCIETY

This only works on older sites with static pages however there are many such URL tricks that can be used to find information beyond the power of a search engine. There's nothing illegal about this and hackers would use far more sophisticated techniques if they wanted to get hold of information. This is purely something that's an advantage for researchers who have a small knowledge of IT.

It works because many websites are really just like looking at text files in directories on a computer hard drive. All that has happened is by deleting the file name the web server has returned the index.html page and if that's not there then most web servers either give a directory listing of the files or don't allow access to any of the files within the directory.

We can go to another directory by deleting another bit of the web address so it becomes

http://www.bgmi.us/web/

And there's a standard page listing the files and directories because no one has written an index.html file. It's possible to click into directories where the user has set read access. In this case there seems to be some sort of encyclopedia.

http://www.bgmi.us/web/cyclopedia/

There's a very long list of the web files there. There's no index.html (or index.htm) but there's a few files that look like index files.

There are lots more tricks like this that experienced online researchers can use to find nuggets of information that wouldn't be found using standard search engine-only techniques.