How to Search a Specific Domain in Google

Search within only one website with this tip

By
Tim Fisher
Photo of Tim Fisher, Lifewire GM and Writer
Tim Fisher
Senior Vice President & Group General Manager, Tech & Sustainability
  • Emporia State University
Tim Fisher has more than 30 years' of professional technology experience. He's been writing about tech for more than two decades and serves as the VP and General Manager of Lifewire.
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Updated on January 6, 2022

You can use Google to search within a specific domain by typing site: before the website. What it does is limits all search results to that specific website only, which can drastically narrow down your search efforts.

For example, maybe you're researching a paper on the Jurassic period and you only want to see results from .edu sites or some other top-level domain (TLD), or maybe even from one specific website.

Filtering Google search results by URL isn't the same as filtering URLs by certain words. The former is what we talk about here on this page, but if you want to do the latter and find URLs that match your searches, use the inurl command instead (there's an example in step 2 below).

How to Search a Single Domain

Here's how to limit your searches to one website or TLD:

  1. Type site: in the search field, without adding a space after it.

  2. Type the TLD or website URL that you want to confine the results to, add a space, and then enter a regular search term.

    Google site search for best apps on Lifewire

    Here are some examples:

    • site:edu school
    • site:gov "George Washington"
    • site:lifewire.com OLED
    • site:co.uk tech
    • site:amazon.com "prime day"
    • site:nasa.gov filetype:pdf mars
    • site:media.defense.gov inurl:2017 report

  3. Press Enter to begin the search.

How to Search Multiple Websites at the Same Time

Similar to searching through a single website, Google lets you duplicate the command to search through multiple domains at once. Essentially, it's as if you're running a typical search across the entire web, but instead of sifting through the plethora of websites out there, you're limiting the results to the few that you really want to pay attention to.

For example, here's a search you could perform to find everything that Lifewire and NASA has on electric vehicles: 

site:lifewire.com OR site:nasa.gov "electric vehicles"

The trick to get this to work is to employ OR. This gives Google permission to list either source. If you don't add this to the search, you'll get zero results.

Just like we did above with the single site search, you can tack on several other search parameters. Here's a longer example that further constricts the results:

site:defense.gov OR site:nasa.gov intitle:cryptography filetype:pdf

More Google Search Tips

Using the site: command in a Google search is one way to narrow down the results to help you find what you're looking for, but there are plenty of other search commands, too.

For example, filetype is used to search Google for files that have a specific file extension, inurl shows only results with that term in the URL, and quotes used around phrases group terms together.

As you can see in some of those examples above, you can combine other search commands with site: for even more relevant results.

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