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Here is a free sample from one of
the 19 lessons about mastering the advanced secrets
of Google:
Searching by domain is one of the single best ways
you can refine your search in Google Advanced. In
the following three lessons, we'll look at:
- country domains
- sub-domains
- where to find domain lists
- other domains
- excluding domains
Let's say you want information about mad cow disease
and you feel the best sources will be in the UK, where
the disease is the most widespread. So you put in
the following keywords:
"mad cow disease" england
only to find many American sites that talk about
England:
Changing the keywords to
"mad cow disease" uk
improves the results, but many of the 30,000 results
are American or non-UK:
Why does this happen? Remember, Google is just a
computer program. It looks for the words you request,
not the concept. It's looking for the words "england"
or "uk" on the web page, not necessarily
for pages that come from the UK
But you can solve the problem by going to Google's
Advanced Search page,
Open up Google
in a new window and put the words mad cow disease
in the exact phrase box.
But notice the line that starts with Domain (it's
highlighted in yellow below). It allows us
to search only from a domain we specify. The entire
web is divided into domains and every country has
its own code.
In the box at the end of this line, add this domain:
.uk
When you're done, click the Search button. We get
about 4,000 sites and every single one of them comes
from UK-registered sites:
Click
here if you want to try this domain search yourself.
The same logic works with any other country. A Canadian
journalist doing a search on
"gun control"
will get a lot of American-dominated news. That can
be ameliorated slightly by asking for
"gun control" canada
But again, Google is looking for the word Canada,
not Canadian web pages. But 38,000 of the 42,000 pages
found are American or commercial sites:
If you wanted only Canadian sites, you would be better
to go to Google Advanced and do a domain search. All
4,000 results are Canadian-registered sites.
Of course, many sites in the UK and other countries
use the .com domain -- which is for commercial sites,
mainly but not exclusively in the US. So doing a .uk
or a .ca domain search does not mean you will
find all the best sites from those countries.
There might be an excellent UK or Canadian group that
has built a .com site.
But doing a domain search does ensure that every
single one of your results comes from the country
you want.
You can thus use the domain search by country to
find out valuable regional information.
Click
here to try two more domain searches yourself.
Let's say you want to find out what English-language
Yugoslav sites say about Milosevic on trial at the
International Court of the Hague.
Put in this command:
and you get these results:
Or click
here to find web sites in Pakistan to find web
sites in Pakistan that are discussing the war on terrorism.
Start by putting in this command:
and you get these results:
REMINDER: Notice
how we put a "+" sign next to
the small word "on". As we learned
in Lesson 6, this is to force Google to
include the word within the exact phrase
so we don't get pages that talk about war
and somewhere else about terrorism but only
about the "war on terrorism."
Click
here if you want to try some more domain searches
by yourself. When you're done, come back to this
window and we'll look at sub-domains and where to
find lists of all the domains.
Did you find these free sample
in improving your web research skills? There is much
more in the full course -- 19 lessons that will help
turn you into a master user of Google.
Click
here to sign up for the full course.
Click
here to find out about other invaluable online courses.
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