How to Use Google to Search Within a Single Website

Ever want to use Google to search a single website? You can easily do this. 

Why You Would Want to Search within a Website

You would want to use this Google trick when you are fairly certain you can find information on a topic from a given website, but you are not exactly sure where. Sometimes you may remember that you found a great recipe on a magazine's website but can't remember the issue. Sometimes the site itself may have a problematic internal search.

Either way, it is often faster and easier to find a key phrase and specify that you only want results from a given website. 

How to Search within a Website Using Google Grammar

You can use Google's site: syntax to restrict your search to find only results within a single website. Make sure there's no space between site: and your desired website.

Follow your website with a space and then the desired search phrase. 

You don't need to use the HTTP:// or HTTPS:// portion of the website's URL, but it doesn't do any harm if you include it. 

site:google.about.com power search tricks

You can go ahead and click on that link if you'd like to see the results. Notice the structure of this search. All results are within google.about.com rather than all of About.com. 

The second half is the search phrase. It is usually better to use more than one word in your search to help you narrow down your results. Searching for something like "tricks" or "search" would be far too general, even when it's restricted to the site topic of Google.

 

You could also widen the search to include all the About.com Guide Sites:

site:about.com power search tricks

Rather than just searching within the site topic of Google, the search is now broadened to include everything within the About.com domain. This same search can be widened to include all the Web sites within a top level domain.

That's a search that is almost too wide to be useful. If you want to search for something with a .com domain, you might as well just perform a regular Google search without the syntax.

However, if you are searching for government information, you could search just within .gov sites. Google used to have a verticle search engine called "Uncle Sam" that only searched within government websites. It has been discontinued, but using this trick gets pretty close to the same results. For example:

site:gov seized property ohio

That's not the end of the story, however. Google's site: syntax can be mixed with some other search syntax tricks, such as AND and OR searches.