Tip of the Week: Google Site Search!

Image credit: "Search!," by J. Beall

Have you ever visited a web site whose search feature didn't work?  It's quite frustrating, especially if you know that something of interest is located somewhere on the site, and you can't get at it just by browsing.  One alternative is to use Google's "site:" command.

Here's an example: Let's say you wanted to locate the last Tip of the Week I shared.  Go to Google Search, and enter a search constructed as follows:

[search term/s] site:[URL of the site you want to search]

Example:

tip site:fm-cab.blogspot.com

You can include more than one search term:

tip week site:fm-cab.blogspot.com

And you can add double quotes to conduct a phrase search:

"tip of the week" site:fm-cab.blogspot.com

Note: Make sure there is no space between "site:" and the URL you enter.  You don't have to include http:// in front of the URL

This will not work if you are trying to conduct a search within a database or other parts of the web that aren't/can't be crawled and indexed by Google (or other search engines). 

Tagged Tips.