Google Tip #1 - How To Use Google To Search Any Website.

So you need to search a website but the on-site search engine stinks or doesn't exist?  It happens...more than it should but true to most things web related, there's a work-around.  Google has a long list of tools (also known as operators) that people can use to help focus and refine searches, and one such tool is the "site:" operator.

The "site:" operator can be used to search any website that's indexed by Google.  Remember that you are using Google's search engine and if it's not in Google - it's not going to be found using this method!

Take a look at the image below:

The query above searches all of Foxnews.com for "banana split".  There are two parts:  [The keyword or words] and [The site].  In this case the keywords are "banana split" and the site is "Foxnews.com".  You can see the results here. If you took the time to look, you may have noticed that 29 instances of the words banana split exist on Foxnews or rather within the pages from Foxnews.com that are indexed in Google.

A few more searches using the "site:" operator.

• Beer on CNN.com
• Beer on Foxnews.com
• Obama on The Onion
• McCain on The Onion

Bear with me - I tried to be fair. It was interesting that CNN had roughly 3000 results for beer, while FoxNews.com had more than 14,000. And for those of you who are unfamiliar with The Onion, the information is intended for "entertainment purposes only"

Google's chock full of little goodies to help people find what they're looking for. After all, there's a reason their stock is trading at $$$ per share.