Sometimes one is faced with a website that contains data that you would like to find but you do not want to go through every single page of that website to find it. Perhaps they have just taken a link down that points to the data.

Say you have a bully running a large on-line bidding platform and one of the auctioneers starts to ask to many questions like say Robert Mayo did when he asked very pointed questions of Proxibid.com (see my randomauctioneerthoughts blog for the questions). Further lets assume Robert now has been de-listed by said site (and he has.)

This is a good time to explain the Google Site command. If you are looking for data on a site (say the word Mayo) and you only want to look on one site, and not the entire Internet then you can tell Google ” look for this one word and just look for it here on this one site”. Here is the way the command is put together term1 term2 term3 ect… site:website.com. In our case it would read like this

Mayo site:proxibid.com or if you want to get more specific and find not just all of Mayo’s auctions but just the Bonnie and Clyde auction you would use this form Mayo Bonnie site:proxibid.com points you right to all the references to this auction that are on Proxibid’s website and only on Proxibids website.

You could also use this command to find other data on a website quickly. Say you were looking for a lawyer that represented a large company and that lawyers number would not be on an easy to access web page because the company would not want everyone to have access to the number. Lets say in this case that you knew the company was in Nashville (like say Fedex). You could Google Nashville area codes and you would find that the area code there is 615 then you could use the sight command to look at the company web site and return only the pages with the area code and the word president like this 615 president site:website.com.  If you did that you might notice that most of the numbers at Fedex are not local so you might go back and search on Fedex and find that their company address starts with 942. You could string together any number of terms to limit the results of this search with things like the NOT, AND, OR operators so it might look like this

(942 OR 615) AND president -shipping OR -packing site:fedex.com this search gives you a wonderful result of 97 links to leaders over at Fedex with things like their wistleblower policy, their investor relations policy. Of course this search might be to limiting because it is asking Google to tell you about the president level at Fedex (which of course would include Vice Presidents) but it is asking to not get results with the word shipping and shipping is what they do over at Fedex, but you get the point.