The "inurl:" operator no longer works in Google.

[katar1]

Hi everyone! I used to publish on forums, blogs, and so on.

I used to parse queries using a parser, using the inurl: operator for each query, and the results were great. Lately, when I tried to parse something for projects, the results were just crap. I later read news that Google has started gradually disabling this operator. If anyone has encountered this, please tell me how you solve this problem.

Thanks in advance!

 

[technopastor77]

Yeah, Google's been quietly gutting the advanced operators — inurl:, and to a degree site:/intitle: — especially for scraped/automated queries. Two things stacked: they cut a lot of operator precision, and they got aggressive about rate-limiting and fingerprinting anything that looks like a parser hitting the SERPs.

What still works for me is pulling results through an actual browser session instead of raw parser requests — same queries, but the request looks human, so you don't hit the degraded/empty results nearly as fast. Slower, but the data's real. Raw operator parsing

 

[Nemanja]

Nemanja

What still works for me is pulling results through an actual browser session instead of raw parser requests

Browser session helps, but the other half of the problem is that Google stopped honouring &num=100. Once you are capped at ten results a request you need ten times the requests for the same depth, which is exactly what trips the fingerprinting you are trying to avoid.

For link prospecting I moved most of the operator work to Bing. inurl: still behaves there and the index overlap is good enough for finding forums and blog footprints, even if coverage is thinner. What are you actually parsing for, footprints or competitor backlinks?