I decided to add this “Quick Tips” section to our blog for those of you, who don’t really have time to go through all my rambling….:), here I will offer only the very brief tips.
Today, we will cover Google’s SITE: command. When you type this command to your search box together with your search terms, Google will restrict your search results to the site or domain you specify. Useful domains include the following – .edu (US universities), .gov (US government), .ca (Canadian content), .ac.uk (UK universities), .org (mostly NGO’s). You can also restrict your results to a site or domain through the domains selector on the Advanced Search page.
For instance, if you search Google in a usual manner for arthritis, you get approximately 86 million hits! With some .com websites coming at the tops of the list. Can you trust this information? Can you recommend it to anybody? Not always!
So, how about maybe searching information on arthritis published by the Canadian government (of course I am assuming here that you trust the information compiled by the Canadian government 🙂
So, you could type arthritis site:gc.ca into your Google search box, and this command will restrict Google to search only information on arthritis published on the Canadian Federal Government websites (which end with gc.ca)
You can see that by using this simple command we retrieve only 80,000 results and the first hits are an information sheet and a book on arthritis in Canada, published by the Public Health Agency of Canada (http://www.phac-aspc.gc.ca/). Reliable information, isn’t it?
Play around with the site: command and let me know how do feel about using it 🙂