Google Site Search
posted in miscellany, technology |I was searching to test out Google’s new built-in “search within a site” box that now appears for many educational, governmental, and other organizations.
While the “site” search feature has been around a long time, it used to be that in order to use it the searcher needed to know the URL of the website and then needed to enter that URL along with the search keywords into the search box. Using the site search operator has allowed users to search within only that one site (versus searching Google’s entire index) to create more relevant results.
For example, if I wanted to search the United States Postal Service website for information regarding the upcoming stamp price change, my search string might look something like: price change 2008 site:www.usps.com. Or say I wanted to search OCLC for information on WorldCat.org, then my search string might look something like: worldcat.org site:www.oclc.org.
Provided that the URL of the site to be searched is known to begin with, this is a smooth one-search process. But if the URL is not known, then the searcher either needs to perform a keyword search including words from the site name in my search string (which will likely increase recall while decreasing relevance) or the searcher needs to first search for the URL, copy the URL, and then paste it into the search bar along with the search keywords and the site operator.
Neither of these options is quite as smooth, yet many searchers have been conducting just such searches. On the Google Blog, they write about noticing just such a trend: “…there were lots of searchers who would type the name of a specific website as if they wanted to teleport, but would then immediately issue another more a refined search within this site.” Google’s people then decided to experiment with simplifying this process, and they found that “presenting users with a search box as part of the result increases their likelihood of finding the exact page they are looking for.”
This search within a site box showing up on the main Google results page is by no means ubiquitous, but it is available for many sites where it proves most useful (colossal sites that are difficult to navigate to find a specific piece of information that is sought). For example, below is the image for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagin site search from the main page of the Google results:
So be on the lookout for the search within a site box in your own searches. It’s heartening to see that Google continues to look for ways to help us users navigate to the most useful results instead of just leaving us to flail around hopelessly in the morass of results (which still seems to happen sometimes anyway…).
