How to Search a Specific Domain in Google

Search within only one website with this tip

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Tim Fisher
General Manager, VP, Lifewire.com
Tim Fisher has 30+ years' professional technology support experience. He writes troubleshooting content and is the General Manager of Lifewire.
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Tim Fisher
Updated November 18, 2019

You can use Google to search within a specific domain using the site: syntax. 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 the Google results by the 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.

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 iPhone apps on Lifewire

    Here are some examples:

    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.

More Google Search Tips

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

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