Dork Builder by Signal & Shadow

Dork Builder is a browser extension for journalists, fact-checkers, OSINT practitioners, and researchers who use advanced search operators every day. Highlight any text on a web page, right-click, pick a dork, and the extension opens Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, or Yahoo with a properly-formatted query. Every search is logged locally for chain of custody. The extension contains no telemetry, no analytics, no remote code. Source code is available for review and a static privacy audit script ships with the extension. WHAT IT DOES Highlight any text and right-click. The browser's context menu now includes a Dork Builder submenu with thirteen common search operators ready to use: Phrase: search the highlighted text as an exact phrase, search with a wildcard placeholder for any following word, or search for one phrase while excluding another phrase. Site: restrict results to a specific domain you specify, exclude a specific domain, search known paste sites for leaks, or restrict to government domains. Filetype: find PDF documents containing the phrase, or pick a different file type. Title and URL: find the phrase only in page titles, or only in URLs. Date: restrict results to before a date, after a date, or within a date window. Right-click on a link or page itself for the domain context dork: list all indexed pages on a domain. FOUR SEARCH ENGINES Top-level menu items dispatch to Google by default, the same fast path you would expect. Three further submenus, "On Bing", "On DuckDuckGo", and "On Yahoo", repeat the same dorks but route the query to an alternative engine. Only dorks compatible with the chosen engine appear in each submenu, since not every operator is supported on every engine. The builder popup includes an engine picker so parameterised dorks can also be dispatched to any of the four engines. For dorks that need extra inputs (a domain, a file type, a date), choose Build a custom dork from the menu. The builder opens with your selection pre-filled, lets you pick a search engine, fill in the parameter, and shows a live preview of both the query string and the destination URL before dispatching. Every action is recorded in a local activity log: timestamp, engine, source URL, selection text, a SHA-256 hash of the selection, the dork name, the constructed query, and the target URL. Click the toolbar icon to see the activity log. Export the entire log as a SHA-256 signed zip bundle compatible with the standard sha256sum verifier. WHY THIS EXISTS Advanced search operators are documented and have been part of the major search engines for over twenty years. They are how working investigators find leaked PDFs, narrow searches by date or jurisdiction, and surface content that ordinary keyword searches miss. Typing operators by hand is fiddly. The syntax is finicky. A right-click integration that constructs the query from any selection is a real productivity gain. Cross-engine support matters because each engine indexes a different slice of the web. Building it as a logged tool with chain-of-custody export makes it useful for editorial review and reproducibility. READ THIS BEFORE INSTALLING Searches are disclosures to the search engine. Every dork opens a normal browser tab to a search engine URL containing your query. The engine sees the query, your IP address, your user agent, and the Referer header. The extension itself does nothing with this data. For sensitive investigations, consider using Dork Builder in conjunction with a VPN, Tor, or a dedicated browser profile. ARCHITECTURE Dork Builder uses Chrome's contextMenus API with the selection, link, and page contexts. No content script. No host permissions. No <all_urls> matchers. The extension's manifest declares only four permissions: contextMenus, activeTab, storage, downloads. FORENSIC PROVENANCE Every search is captured: timestamp, session ID, engine, selection text, selection hash, source URL, dork name, query, target URL. Logs hold 5,000 entries with oldest-evicted behaviour and a warning at 4,500 so users can export before any data is lost. Export bundles carry the SHA-256 of every file alongside an export manifest. Anyone receiving a bundle can verify integrity offline. Aligned with the Berkeley Protocol on Digital Open Source Investigations. Built and maintained by Signal & Shadow, an independent investigative-journalism and OSINT publication. More at signalandshadow.io.