Sometimes finding what you want on the internet can be a real pain.
You spend hours looking through search results trying to find that one article you heard about, or only partially read, only to become frustrated. You might even know the website you are looking for, but the site itself either has poor navigation, a poorly implemented or missing search function, or both!
Have no fear, for times like those there is a really simple solution to help you. Simply do a site search.
What’s a site search?
If you want to search a specific website, you can do that on Google Search by adding site: right before the URL for the website, then leave a space and type your search query as normal.
For example, ‘site:wscountytimes.co.uk road closed‘ will search for all pages at wscountytimes.co.uk that includes the words road and closed. If you want to get more specific, you can surround the search query in quotes for an exact match. So ‘site:wscountytimes.co.uk “road closed”‘ would search for only those pages that include the phrase “road closed”.
Here’s a couple of screenshots to help explain it. Click on the images to expand them if you need to.
You can see from the text highlighted in bold, that the first search query is less specific than the second.
What is really handy about creating a site specific search term, is that you can bookmark it like any other web page. So if it is something you are likely to need on a regular basis, you can return to it for the latest updates whenever you need them.
There are more ways you can customise Google Search results, such as excluding specific keywords (just put a minus sign before the word you want to exclude). You can find the full range of options in Google’s help document to refine your web searches.