How To Search A Specific Domain
By Kim on Apr 30, 2008 in Latest Articles, Search Tools
It is important to know how to search a specific domain; when you type in a keyword, the search engine delivers every page it finds with that word in it…millions and millions of returns. A great amount of resources just went from helpful to overwhelming. You probably could get by with twenty or so results, if they are targeted to your research needs.
There are easy ways to accomplish this.
First, are there any obvious choices of websites that would contain the information you need - if you want to know about Derek Jeter, you know that typing in ‘baseball.com’ would give you a lot about Derek Jeter, but obviously will deliver irrelevant sites as well.
If however, you add a more specific request:
derek jeter site:baseball.com
See I have added the term: site:baseball.com
This tells Google to confine your search to only pages on
www.baseball.com.
Here’s a few more examples of searching for ‘Derek Jeter’
on specific domains:
derek jeter site:cnn.com
derek jeter site:baseballchannel.com
derek jeter site:foxsports.com
Try a few of these on your topics to get a feel for how it works.
So what do you do when you’re searching for information
about a topic (such as ‘baby food’) in which you have
no clue what specific domains might be related to it?
Here’s what you do.
1. Go to Google and do a general search for ‘baby food’
2. Look at the sites that appear in the top 10, note the
domain names (my results turned up a site at wholesomebabyfood.com).
3. Redo your search for ‘baby food’, limiting your
search to one of the top 10 domains listed (such as
wholesomebabyfood.com):
baby food site:wholesomebabyfood.com
For me, this returned only thousands pages of highly focused information
related to baby food recipes,food charts, and reviews as opposed to the 16,000,000
pages that resulted from a general Web search. Much easier.
For sports, pets, health-related issues, cars, food, and
other topics, Search Automator 3 has the built-in ability to
search for information on specific domains as we’ve just
discussed. This will help you easily narrow your
search results into something a lot more useful.
For more information about Search Automator 3, visit the
Search Automator 3 homepage.
This resource has provided me with research results it would have taken hundreds if not thousands of hours to find on my own, if ever.
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