Online forums and bulletin boards can be great places to find answers. The problem however is getting through all the information. Sometimes this is because users post a question or solution in the wrong topic. The other problem is many forums lack a search feature. There is a quick workaround if the forum doesn’t require a password to view the data. – Google’s Site: operator.

One service I’ve been testing is a web-based task manager called Nozbe. The service and its iPhone counterpart have a lot going for it. The company also has a dedicated forum for users to post questions and feature request. The problem is Nozbe’s online forum doesn’t have a search feature. There’s lots of great content, but it’s difficult to scroll through countless entries to see if someone has addressed my issue. Instead, I use one of Google’s search operators.

Google’s Site: Operator

The process below is how I use the Site: operator feature to query a website. Think of this as a framework where you can substitute the domain and terms you need.

1. Find the base URL component of the site or forum you want to search. In the case of Nozbe’s forum, the forum post URLs start with www.nozbe.com/gtd/forum/. Depending on the site and page, you may have extraneous information in the URL such as session IDs that you don’t want to include.

2. Go to Google. In the US, that’s http://www.google.com/ but may differ based on your country.

3. In the Search box, type your query just as you would normally use Google.

4. Type a space and then type site: followed by the URL string for the forum you wish to search. Do NOT add a space after the colon. I don’t add the “www” part as many sites have cannonicalization problems.

5. Click the Google Search button

In the above example, I was trying to see if anyone had posted about alphabetizing project lists on the Nozbe iPhone application.

Using the Site: Operator to Exclude Sites

Another nice features of the Site: search operator is you can use it to exclude a site from the search results. I find this useful if I want to see what others have said about a product besides the company. For example, maybe I’m interested in the Fitbit Tracker, but I don’t want to see info from the company. I could use the following query:

fitbit –site:fitbit.com

The key to excluding a site from the search results is to place a minus sign before the site:

The Site: operator is just one of the advanced features of Google search. You can find other useful ones on their more search help page.

Related Google Tutorial

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