Search tips and better site queries

by on October 5, 2005 in Google/SEO

Philipp has a great list of tips, which Tara distilled and then she added her own comments. Great stuff.

Here’s a tip that I haven’t seen mentioned yet. You know that you can use site:gov or site:ac.uk to search over the contents of a top-level domain, right? For example, you can do [site:ac.uk mp3] to look for pages with the word “mp3” on UK university pages.

But did you know that you can also use the site: operator with subdirectories? For example, the search [site:apple.com/support calendar] will restrict the search for “calendar” to pages on apple.com/support. Or [site:channel9.msdn.com/wiki dhtml] will search the wiki subdirectory of channel9.msdn.com for the word “dhtml.” This has been something I’ve wanted for a while, even though I could always use inurl: as a workaround to get the same behavior. After I noticed that MSN has this ability (Chris Payne, you’re a Kentuckian too, right? Kudos!), I stopped someone and asked why our site: operator didn’t work with subdirectories. “What are you talking about?” was the reply. “We’ve supported that for months–didn’t you notice?” Oh well. I’ve been wasting keystrokes with inurl: for a little while, so I wanted to mention this to you. 🙂

7 Responses to Search tips and better site queries (Leave a comment)

  1. Scott Fish October 5, 2005 at 8:36 pm

    That is great advice!
    I have also had some good results with the command: [site:.edu Keyword] and this will pull up only educational sites that have your keyword in it. Very useful when searching for an academic explaination and sifting through the commercial sites. Ironically I have also found some “perfect fit” sites to include links to and from my site with using this method.

  2. Andrew Scaife October 6, 2005 at 9:54 am

    btw, congrats to Google on their alliance with Sun. I’ve been waiting for you guys to give MS a run for their money 🙂

    ps. Any chance someone could look into making the G toolbar Autofill feature work with ASP.NET forms?

  3. Lee Drinkwater October 6, 2005 at 10:46 am

    I didn’t know about the sub directory thing, that’s really interesting and useful to know.

  4. Dave October 7, 2005 at 1:57 pm

    This is a nice shortcut, but in certain cirumstances [site:domain.com/dir] returns a different set of results than my old standby [site:domain.com inurl:domain.com/dir]

    I’m not sure exactly what’s going on, but it seems to mostly affect queries that return a large number of supplemental results. Wierd.

  5. Alan Perkins October 10, 2005 at 8:37 am

    Nice feature. Now you need to add to the following to the GTB search dropdown…

    [G] Search V
    ….
    Current Site
    Current Directory and Below
    ….

  6. Matt October 10, 2005 at 12:58 pm

    Dave, I’ll check on that. Maybe the supplemental index doesn’t support that type of site: search yet. Thanks for mentioning it.

  7. Ganesh J. Acharya December 13, 2008 at 1:03 am

    That’s a big list and very well explained, thanks matt

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