Mini-Contest (for solution ideas, please review the comments)

[Irina Shamaeva]

It's time for a new sourcing mini-contest. Here it is!

Is there a way to X-ray github.com for emails of its members?

Please email your answers to [e-mail] by the end of the week.

The first person to provide the correct answer gets the materials and one month support for my webinar "Uncovering Hidden Profiles" (which I have made available on my blog) or a credit for a future webinar.

[Irina Shamaeva]

Clarification on the contest: at least some emails should show up in the page with your search results on Google or Bing.

[Irina Shamaeva]

Hey Sourcers,

Thanks for all the replies; I got many! I got one response that was exactly correct, picking the nuances of X-raying github. I'm happy to offer the prize (webinar materials) to the person who provides the second correct answer.

The task was (and remains) to show emails of members in the search results' page.

Hint. Please compare these searches: site:github.com j2ee name email intitle:profile and site:github.com j2ee name gmail intitle:profile. See something strange happening?

Thanks,

Irina

[Jamie Stout]

I do.  The first sting is searching for any email address and the search returns hits.  However, the second string is searching for email address that are specific to gmail and returns no hits.

[Irina Shamaeva]

Yes, but why does the second search return no hits? Some of the results in the first search have gmail in them.

[Andy Langton]

It's because the email addresses are obfuscated and only written to the page via javascript, so you won't find them directly in Google's index. Or indeed, in the stripped version of the cache, which is a good rule of thumb test for this sort of thing:

 

webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://github.com/montylounge&strip=1

[Irina Shamaeva]

That's great, Andy! Yes, they are obfuscated. (You won't find them in the HTML source of a github profile.)

The next question is, can you find any email addresses by searching on Google, so that they show up on the search results page? Thanks a lot for joining by the way!

Also, can you please explain about the cache with some more detail? 

[Andy Langton]

You can certainly find unobfuscated emails. In boolean style, as that seems appropriate:

 

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Agithub.com+%22hotmail+com%2...

 

The cache is harder to explain, but to simplify, it can be regarded as one of Google's copies of the HTML source of a page. So, you can see "what Google saw". That's over-simplifed, but broadly accurate.

[Irina Shamaeva]

Hi Andy - this is great. I'd say your comments qualify you for winning! Please feel free to update you profile picture (we feature winners on the site).

There's an interesting nuance, still, though, if you are curious to investigate. If you search for 

site:github.com name email gmail intitle:profile dallas

you will see the gmail address in the search results page for the first result, but it's obfuscated on the page itself. 

[Jamie Stout]

Ok, please pardon the newbie question.  When I replace github.com with say my company web address the search does not bring back results and I know we all have gmail accounts.  I must be missing thing here...any help?

[Kandula Santosh Kumar]

Jamie, 

What is your company name ?

 

I used facebook.com and I am able to see the results

 

site:facebook.com email gmail intitle:profile

 

 

[Andy Langton]

That's an interesting search, Irina - I believe it is occurring because Google does execute javascript, but the cache is a pure and simple copy of the HTML of the page (hence the over-simplification above). Google by no means always executes javascript, which would probably explain why for some profiles the email remains unreadable.It is the descrepancy between an index and a cahce, which is one of the trickier parts of understanding search engines.

I don't know definitively about this example, but I will find out via some testing :)

In terms of your competition, while I like winning, and I'm glad y=my comments are appreciated. But I am more interested in the methodology, and I'm here from the point of view of learning things that I don't know about search.

I'm not in sourcing, so I think it would be better to give another member of your community the prize :)

[Mac]

Andy,

 

I like your reasoning both in x-ray and prize matters :)

 

Maybe you can pick a member and share that prize.