Have you ever read a great article on a specific website, but a week later you can’t find it? You try using the website’s built-in search bar, but it is incredibly slow and returns terrible results.
Instead of relying on a website’s clunky internal search engine, you can force Google Chrome to use the full power of Google Search, but restrict it to only look inside that one specific website.
How to Use the “Site:” Operator
The secret to this trick is a special search operator called site:. You can type this directly into the main address bar at the top of your Google Chrome window.
The Syntax:
[your search keywords] site:[website domain]
Example 1: Searching a News Site
Imagine you want to read articles about “artificial intelligence” but you only want to see articles published by the New York Times. You would click the address bar in Chrome and type:
artificial intelligence site:nytimes.com
Press Enter. Every single result on the Google Search page will be from nytimes.com.
Example 2: Searching a Forum
If you are trying to fix a problem with your Honda Civic and want to search a massive car forum without using their terrible search tool, type:
brakes squeaking site:civicforums.com
Important Rules for Using the Site Operator
To ensure this trick works perfectly every time, keep these rules in mind:
- No Spaces: There must be absolutely NO space between the word
site:and the website domain. If you typesite: nytimes.com(with a space), Google will ignore the command and just do a normal, global search. - No HTTP: You do not need to include “https://” or “www” in the domain name. Just use the core domain (e.g.,
apple.comorwikipedia.org). - It Works Everywhere: This trick isn’t technically a Chrome feature; it is a Google Search feature. However, because Chrome uses Google Search by default in its address bar, it is the fastest way to execute the search without having to load Google.com first.
How to Search an Exact Phrase
If you want to be even more specific, you can combine the site: operator with quotation marks to search for an exact phrase on a specific website.
For example, if you know a website published an article with the exact phrase “best budget laptops of 2024”, you would type:
"best budget laptops of 2024" site:theverge.com
This tells Google Chrome to search The Verge, and only show pages that contain that exact string of words in that exact order, saving you hours of frustrating manual searching.