How to Limit a Google Search to a Specific Domain

This article explains how to use Google to search individual website domains for your desired topics. For example, searching .edu sites or some other top-level domain (TLD) for info about the Jurassic period.

How to Search a Single Domain

Here's how to limit your searches to one website or TLD:

1. Type site: in the search field, without adding a space after it.

2. Type the TLD or website URL that you want to confine the results to, add a space, and then enter a regular search term.

   Here are some examples:

   • site:edu school
   • site:gov "George Washington"
   • site:lifewire.com OLED
   • site:ai email tool
   • site:co.uk tech
   • site:amazon.com "prime day"
   • site:nasa.gov filetype:pdf mars
   • site:media.defense.gov inurl:2017 report

3. Press Enter to begin the search.

How to Search Multiple Websites at the Same Time

Similar to searching through a single website, Google lets you duplicate the command to search through multiple domains at once. Essentially, it's as if you're running a typical search across the entire web, but instead of sifting through the plethora of websites out there, you're limiting the results to the few that you really want to pay attention to.

For example, here's a search you could perform to find everything that Lifewire and NASA has on electric vehicles:

site:lifewire.com OR site:nasa.gov "electric vehicles"

The trick to get this to work is to employ OR. This gives Google permission to list either source. If you don't add this to the search, you'll get zero results.

Just like we did above with the single site search, you can tack on several other search parameters. Here's a longer example that further constricts the results to show only PDF files with the word cryptography in the title, and they need to exist on two specific .GOV websites:

site:defense.gov OR site:nasa.gov intitle:cryptography filetype:pdf

When to Use a Site Search

A Google site search is most useful when there are simply too many irrelevant results. If you know that the content you're looking for can be found on a specific website or TLD, adding site: to the search will immediately cut back the results you have to look through.

Although rare, some websites don't include their own search tool. Using Google to search just that one website essentially provides the same search function that's missing from that site.

More Google Search Tips

Using the site: command is one way to narrow down results and help you find what you're looking for, but there are plenty of other search commands, too.

For example, filetype is used to search Google for files that have a specific file extension (like with the PDF example above), inurl shows only results with that term in the URL, and quotes used around phrases group terms together.

You can also trigger a negative query search, such as -site:com, to remove all .COM websites from the results. It's easier to do this than to line up all the other TLDs but then exclude .COM.

As you can see in some of those examples above, you can combine other search commands with site: for even more relevant results. However, as you stack more and more restrictive commands, the amount of results you're given gets increasingly smaller, so it's recommended to ease into it as necessary.