Rock Your Searches With the “site:” Operator

A Quick Search Tip for You and Your Students

Just a quick post today, sharing one my favorite web search engine techniques.

To search just one specific site, or just one type of site (i.e. one domain), use the “site:” command in your search.

Here are some examples …

• To search just education sites, include “site:edu” in your search. For example, if I wanted to search for published strategic technology plans from colleges and universities, I would enter this in Google search:

• Another example might be searching the US government's web sites for Financial Aid information (like if you forgot the acronym for the FAFSA site and wanted to find it). Search “financial aid site:gov”).
• To search one specific web site, you can use the same operator, with a full web site url. For example, if you wanted to search for published information about grading practices on your school's web site, you could enter something like “grades site:yourschoolswebsite”. So for my school, that would be “grades site:cw.edu”
• One last example, if I wanted to find all of the articles and other content on University Business that I published or that reference me, I could type “kelly walsh site:universitybusiness.com”.

I find that use the site operator quite frequently. I hope it helps to make your searches more productive! This operator works on Google and Bing, and probably in quite a few other search engines.