site: search

A few weeks ago I stated that special operators are seldom needed.

I'm surprised no one challenged that.

Special operators (site: inurl: intitle: etc.) do have good uses. Thanks to Alan November, here's a good use of the site: command. The example Alan gave in his IETC keynote last Friday was searching for information on how Turkish bloggers viewed a controversial speech by the Pope (back in 2006) that Islam is violent religion--a speech resulting in rioting and deaths. A reasonable query for this purpose is: pope speech riot Islam Turkey. But if you look at the results, you don't see Turkish perspectives but information published by Time, Wikipedia, the Daily Mail and the like.

But this query produces very different results: pope speech riot Islam site:tr. The site abbreviation for Turkey is tr. Now all the results are from Turkey. The site: command is especially good for filtering results from a specific location, like a country.

What other uses can you think of?