Do you use Site:_____ in Google searches? I DO!

On my blog it’s hard to find old stuff that I’m looking for. I don’t understand how the “search” box works, and if I’m looking for a phrase I can’t really use it.

Enter the SITE search on Google.

Check this out:

Each color represents the three main things in this search:

1. YELLOW: Simple put site: to tell Google that you want to restrict the search to a specific website.  Don’t ever change this – it is always site:
2. GREEN: This is the website you want to search on.  My example is on the JibberJobber blog, but you can put in a company site (like apple or intel or whatever). I always put the entire URL, including the https://www, and if you want to do a search on just a portion of the site, you can do that (like I’m doing with /blog).
3. ORANGE (or whatever color that is): the search phrase.  This can be one word, of course, or you can do all the cool search stuff you expect to do with Google.  In this example, a phrase is within quotes, which means get me those three words just like they are there…

I do this regularly to find old stuff on my blog, with over 5 years of posts.  You can do this to do research on companies, openings, people, etc.

Here’s another example of a Google site search I just did and found some interesting results – this shows where on LinkedIn people say “Jason Alba” — I found a discussion where people where talking about me, or referring to me, that I didn’t know about before!

NOTE: to do this, simply go to Google.com, and put all three elements in the search box.  There isn’t a special page you have to go to do do a site search.

Have fun with this one!