Google’s pretty good at surfacing relevant content based on your search query. But sometimes you need something so insanely specific that a general keyword phrase doesn’t really do it for you, especially for marketers on the hunt for a specific piece of content. Enter the Google site: search. This allows you to search just one domain — not the entire internet — for a particular search term.
How to Search Within a Site Using Google
- Go to Google.com.
- Enter site:www.website.com search term into the search box.
- Refine your search.
This Google search returns the results for ‘google search website’ but limits it to just the specified domain. This will also extend the search to all sub-domains by default. You can read more about running a Google search within a specific website in this article.
Add a google search box to your website
This is another way of achieving the goal of searching within a website. But this is targeted more towards the users of a website than the owner. Here we will visit the steps required to add the ExpertRec Custom search engine to your website. This is one of the easiest setup processes of all the available options out there and is highly recommended.
- Navigate to https://cse.expertrec.com/newuser?platform=cse and signup with your Google ID.
- Enter your website’s URL when prompted. You can select a server location near you and add the URL of your sitemap if you wish to. These will be auto-detected otherwise.
- You can play around with the settings and customize the UI as the crawl runs. Once it is complete, you can check out a fully functional demo before taking the search to your website.
- You can take the search to your website with little to no effort. All you need to do is to paste the code snippet available on the dashboard on your website.
ExpertRec comes with more customization options that you can explore. You can read this article to find a more detailed guide on the installation and configuration.
