A shortcut for Googling the current web site

I use a lot of bookmarklets to make my browsing faster and more convenient. I use them to stop blinking text, subscribe to RSS feeds, post to this blog, hide all images on a page, and so on.
One of the most important bookmarklets I add to my browser is one I found at MacWorld that enables you to search for text throughout the site you’re currently viewing, not just the current page.

Just today, for example, I wanted to know whether I had ever blogged on the topic of boredom. So I navigated to the blog and clicked on the Google Site Search bookmarklet in my Links toolbar. In the dialog box that popped up, I entered “boredom|boring” and hit OK.

The bookmarklet piped my search text through Google’s “site:” search filter and the browser returned a list of pages from my blog that contained the search terms.

I find the Google site: search to be more reliable than most web sites’ built-in search facility. It’s a fabulous addition to any Web user’s research toolkit.

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  1. “Site:” is very handy indeed. And I think you’re right about built-in searches. I added a “site:” search to my blog to counter Blogger’s mediocre search results. (I put the explanation behind my name above; the page that explained it all is no longer online.)

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