Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Using Site Searches to Search Smarter

If you include a site specification in your query, search engines restrict the search results to the site of the domain you specify. For example, if you want to search for admissions information from Western Washington University, enter the following query in Yahoo, Google, or Live Search: admissions site:wwu.edu

Notice that the search results from Live Search are restricted to pages on the Western Washington University site:

Site specific search results in Live Search

Search Tips
You can find a wealth of search tips for Google, Live Search, and Yahoo at the following sites:

Search ProviderTips Page
GoogleWeb Search Help Center
Live SearchWindows Live Help
YahooAdvanced Web Search

1 comment:

Corey Smith said...

Another searching feature is to define your own custom search in either Google or Live Search. Let's say you want to search for admissions information at all of the universities in Washington, you could build a custom search that only searches wwu.edu, cwu.edu, washington.edu, etc. The process is surprisingly easy - no coding required.