Michael Fagan's blog

Here’s a summary of what I’ve learned when restricting Yahoo! search to specific websites.

• always use brackets

  prevents errors, especially with boolean. not really necessary in this example, but nevertheless: (search terms) (site:example.com)

• use capitals for boolean

  site:example.com OR site:example2.com

• specify field names always

  Use site:example.com OR site:example2.com not site:(example.com OR example2.com)

• how to specify paths

  to specify a website that isn’t a (sub)domain use site:example.com inurl:folder/folder2 for the website example.com/folder/folder2/

  One problem is that if you are specifying a domain name and a website with a path, results for the latter will be ranked higher, because they match both site: and inurl:. To compensate for that, you could use a different method: inurl:example_com/folder/folder2. Note the use of the underscore instead of a dot for the last (and only the last) dot in the domain name. Also, in rare circumstances, this will find pages that are not in example.com, but have those terms in the URL somewhere.

• specifying multiple folders in a site

  site:example.com (inurl:folder OR inurl:folder2)
  or
  inurl:example_com/folder OR inurl:example_com/folder2

• specifying multiple sites with paths

  this can be derived from previous points, but here goes: site:example.com OR (site:example2.com inurl:folder) or more advanced: site:example.com OR site:example2.com OR (site:example3.com (inurl:folder OR inurl:folder2 OR inurl:folder3))

• Use OR for multiple exclusion

  NOT (site:example.com OR site:example2.com)

• putting it all together

  (search terms) (site:example.com OR (site:example2.com inurl:folder)) NOT (site:sub.example.com OR (site:example.com inurl:somefolder)) not that this is restricting to two websites (one with a path) but excluding sites from that first website in a specific subdomain or folder