New Google Feature?
March 6th, 2008
When I use Google to find information, I often use the “site” limiter to improve the returns.
For instance, when looking for information on the new economic stimulus tax rebate thing, a search for “tax rebate site:irs.gov” gives much more direct information than does just searching for “tax rebate.” Which is great if you know the domain to which you’d like to limit your search, but yesterday, I didn’t.
Someone was looking for information on the James Madison dollar coin, and the U.S. Mint website seemed the most logical place to look for it. However, I didn’t know the Mint’s domain name. So before my usual site-specific search, I first searched for “us mint” to get the domain, and then I was going to run a second search limited to that domain.
But Google is one step ahead of me (I don’t know if this is a new feature or if I just never noticed it before): my search for U.S. Mint returned the Mint’s website as the first result, and the listing included a site search built right in to the search result (see picture).
Neat. And it saves me a step. Searching there for “james madison dollar” gave exactly what the patron was looking for as the first result.
I’m generally skeptical of Google as a company for hording private data, but they do have smart people working there.
[March 6th, 2008 at 8:00 pm | permalink]
It’s a new feature. See http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/search-within-site-tale-of.html
[March 11th, 2008 at 7:37 pm | permalink]
[...] read Brian Herzog’s post New Google Feature? the other day over at Swiss Army Librarian, then I read the Google Blog post Search within a site: [...]