Law Librarian Research Hack: Google Operators

This series of posts will include short explanations of some of our favorite legal research and writing short cuts and work-arounds. At the end of each post, we'll include a brief exercise so you can put your new skill into practice.

Hack #1 - Using Google to search particular websites or domains

Google is powerful, but did you know that using advanced search operators allows you to harness that power to make your research more efficient? My favorite of these operators gives you the ability to search all of the content of a website (e.g. nytimes.com, law.uw.edu, usda.gov) or a particular top-level domain (e.g. .gov, .edu, .org). To use it, simply enter your search term(s) in the main Google search bar as normal, then type site:[website or domain you want to search] (make sure there is no space between "site:" and the website or domain).

So, for example, if you want to search all of the Seattle Times website (seattletimes.com) for articles about the proposed permanent daylight saving time, you would enter:

This trick can also be quite helpful if you want to search the content of a website that doesn't have a built-in search feature.

You can also make your searches broader than just one particular website. Let's say you are researching cannabis regulations and you want to find results from all government websites (.gov). You would enter:

Note that using just site:.gov will retrieve results from both federal and state government websites. If you want to narrow your search and only retrieve results from Washington State government websites, you would use site:wa.gov. If you wanted to be even more specific and only find results from the Washington State Liquor and Cannabis Board website, you would use site:lcb.wa.gov.

Practice exercise!

Find any government website that mentions Bigfoot. Now narrow your search just to your state's government websites. How about Bigfoot articles from your home town newspaper?

Need more?

There are many other Google advanced search operators and you can find articles (like this one) that list available operators and their function.