Todays search tip is all about using the well known and popular search engine Google to search any site for data. Why may you want to do this?

Well sometimes you may find your self visiting a site that has no search button, or their search system really isn’t turning up the results you are looking for. Other times its a lot faster to use Google directly to search for your result, instead of going to the site, entering your search, finding the link from the search results and clicking on the result. This is when using Google special search command can help you find what your looking for.

I recently used this to find information about Prague recommended hotels. When you enter “Best Prague hotels” into Google a lot of results show up. I don’t see a lot of results that stand out immediately and outside of having to visit each link and read each review I could use my new search skills to search a well known travel/review site (Frommers) instead.

How do you search a specific site using Google? Good question the key is to add this command after your search result “+site:“. This tells Google to search only that site for the keywords your looking for. Look at the example below for the full search query you enter into Google.

best prague hotels +site:frommers.com

The first result in Google that comes is just the page I want and can use as a good starting point. Clicking on the first link at the top of your search sends you to Frommer’s Best Hotel Bets of Prague, and now I can use this information to find a great hotel, but it doesn’t stop here.

I quickly read over the best hotel bets and find one that sounds like something that would fit what I’m looking for (Corinthia Towers Hotel). Now I have the hotel I want to do further research and I can use the Google search tip to search one of my other favorite travel sites that has reviews of hotels by people who have stayed there (Trip Advisor)

Entering my new search query into Google:

Corinthia Towers Hotel +site:tripadvisor.com

The first search result goes directly to information about this hotel and user reviews on Trip Advisor.

Using this Google tip, I was able to weed though a lot of searching and visiting various sites trying to find the information I wanted. I was able to cut down the number of searches I want and target exact searches which in the end saves you a lot of time if you use this tip.

This trick can also be used to search top level domains (.edu, .gov etc), so if you want Google to only return results from domains with a .edu (colleges, educational schools) your search would look like this:

micro biology +site:.edu try it.

Well I hope this helps tip helps you find better targeted search results in the future. Also check out my first Google tip “using the minus key” here.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 9th, 2007 at 10:07 am and is filed under Rants and Raves. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.