Lesson 13: Discovering Information with Yandex
Yandex is a powerful Russian search engine with exclusive operators not available on Google or Bing. Using multiple search engines often uncovers additional information, including cached pages that may no longer exist elsewhere.
One of Yandex's standout features (covered later in the image OSINT section) is its advanced face recognition capability from photos.
Basic Searching on Yandex
Go to yandex.com and perform searches similarly to Google.
Most standard operators work: quotation marks for exact phrases, site:, - for exclusion, etc.
Example:
"rishi cabra"
Results often overlap with previous findings but can reveal new details, such as consistent usernames (e.g., rishicabra132 or _RRK132 on Twitter).
One result led to a personal profile page confirming:
- Profile picture (matching known images)
- Employment (Product Manager at "Plenty")
- Twitter handle
- Location and interests (video games, music, football)
- LinkedIn link (already noted)
Add any new profile URLs to your notes for further analysis.
Saved/Cached Copies on Yandex
Yandex frequently retains saved copies of pages. Next to a result, click the three dots → Saved copy.
Tip: If a page is deleted and neither Google nor Bing has a cache, search the exact URL or title on Yandex — it may have a saved version (e.g., from December 11, 2023, in the example).
Note: Yandex does not display total result counts.
Yandex Exclusive Operator: date
Filter results by specific dates, months, years, or ranges — more flexible than the UI time filters.
Syntax examples:
date:2020— All results from 2020date:202001— January 2020date:2022..2023— Results between 2022 and 2023date:>20200101— After January 1, 2020date:<20231231— Before December 31, 2023
This is ideal for historical research or tracking when information appeared online.
Yandex Exclusive Operator: rhost (Subdomain Discovery)
The rhost: operator finds indexed subdomains of a domain.
Syntax: (top-level domain first, then second-level, then .*)
rhost:org.cybersudo.*
Example:
Searching for an old domain revealed academy.cybersudo.org (used years ago but still indexed, even though the site is no longer live).
In this lesson, you've learned how to leverage Yandex for:
- Finding additional profiles and details
- Accessing saved copies of removed pages
- Using the
date:operator for precise time filtering - Using the
rhost:operator to discover subdomains