Computers Confuse Me Blog

Here’s a little search tip for you:

Imagine your doing some research for your boss and you remember reading this perfect reference article that would allow you to complete the research in no time an meet your deadline. You could remember the address to the home page of the website (websiteExample.com) where you read this article but can’t can’t for the life of you seem to remember the articles title. You spend hours and hours browsing through the confusing navigational links and even tried using the sites search feature only to come out empty handed and very frustrated, it seems there article has just disappeared! Now what do you do?

Most likely go to your favorite search engine (possibly google.com) and begin searching for new articles that may not have all of the information you need. If only you could use the power of Google.com with a few keywords you remember from the article to search the entire websiteExample.com website, and only websiteExample.com site, to quickly and easily find the article you’re looking for. You could quickly print it out and make it to your daughters ballet show on time!

You can do exactly that by simply using the “site:” keyword! Using your search query with the “site:” keyword followed by the address of a website tells Google to only return results that match your search query from the website address you entered. i.e. “MySearchWords site:exampleWebsite.com”. Here’s an example of how this feature recently saved me hours or research.

My coworkers and I knew there was an article on appDeploy.com that told how to get around being forced to start an MSI installation using the setup.exe. Searching for this article on appdeploy.com proved to be rather difficult. But by simply searching appDeploy.com using the Google search engine we were able to find the exact article in a matter of seconds. To do this we used the query “setup.exe” followed by the “site:” keyword and then the appDeploy.com address: “Setup.exe site:appdeploy.com“. Google returned results only from the appDeploy.com website and the first result on this page was actually the exact article we were looking for: “Getting Around MSI Packages That Require Setup.exe“.

Other sample searches:

• antispyware site:www.ComputersConfuseMe.com
• Map Services site:http://techcrunch.com
• Canon DSLR site:dpreview.com

Give this tip a try the next time you’re having trouble re-locating an article on a website, I sure you’ll find it a huge time saver.

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