In-Site with Google 0
One way to shorten search time on the web is by limiting your search to a specific domain. Let’s say you want to search pages only from Canada. What do you do? You could go to Google’s homepage and click the appropriate radiobutton. You could use Google’s “Advanced Search”. Or you could do it directly in your search using Google’s site operator. Simple type “site:.ca”—without the quotes but with the colon—followed by your keywords. Voila! Google points you to only those pages with .ca in their domain.
This is a good way to search across classifieds (e.g. guelph.kijiji.ca, toronto.craigslist.org); American educational institutions (.edu); government websites (e.g. gov.on.ca); or combined with the quote operator you can get pretty specific results in a newspaper site, for example, “axis of evil” site:www.nytimes.com. In fact, you may prefer using a Google site search to a website’s own search box based on the results you get. But I’d recommend comparing both searches rather than always relying on one or the other. Sometimes I like, for example, Statistics Canada’s search box; and sometimes I like searching globally across the statcan.ca domain using the site operator.
Remember, when Google doesn’t work, most people don’t have a Plan B. Librarians have lots of Plan B’s. They know when to go to a book, when to call someone, even when to go to Google. Visit www.lib.uoguelph.ca/help/ask.htm for more information.