How to Find Information on a Specific Site

Here is a simple trick I have used dozens of times and yet I discovered recently that several of my friends didn't know about it. Google searches are great at finding information on the Web but Google also frequently floods you with too many hits. Finding what you want is difficult if Google found 10,000 occurrences of the words you want to find.

If you happen to know the exact web site that has the information you seek, you can tell Google to search only that one web site. For instance, let's say that you think you saw an article on paperless genealogy in a past edition of Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter and you wish to read the article again. Go to http://www.google.com and enter the following into the search box:

site:eogn.com paperless genealogy

The key here is to use the search term "site" followed by a colon to specify a search of only that one web site. Note there is no space after the colon. I find the "www." is optional so I usually omit those letters.

The above search will find any articles on www.eogn.com that have both the word "paperless" and the word "genealogy" somewhere on the same page. Of course, the word "genealogy" appears frequently in this newsletter so I might specify a more specific search by using quotes:

site:eogn.com "paperless genealogy"

This search with quote marks specifies to search www.eogn.com for the exact phrase "paperless genealogy". That is, it looks only for occurrences of the word "paperless" immediately followed by the word "genealogy".

You can also perform exactly the same search (and a lot more) by using Google's Advanced Search page at http://www.google.com/advanced_search. If you are not familiar with Advanced Search, I suggest you go to http://www.google.com/advanced_search and try it now. That page can help you quickly narrow your searches to exactly what you seek.


I must admit, however, that using the normal Google search page with the term "site:" followed by the web address is so quick and easy that I normally use that. However, I do use Google's Advanced Search page frequently for more advanced searches.

Note: readers outside the U.S. may prefer to substitute their own country's version of Google. For instance, Canadians will want to go to http://www.google.ca/advanced_search while anyone in the U.K. may prefer to use http://www.google.co.uk/advanced_search and anyone in Italy might prefer to go to http://www.google.it/advanced_search (that page will display in Italian). If you experiment a bit, I think you will find that all the country-specific Advanced Search pages will find the same information.