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Thread poster: Sabine Deutsch
Search within a site - wildcard ?

Sabine Deutsch  Identity Verified
France
Local time: 04:37
Member (2008)
French to German
+ ...
Nov 14, 2009

Good morning,

When I do a research in a website using google's "search within a website", I don't seem to be able to find combinations of the word I am looking for. When I type site:spiegel.de seite, I would like to not only get all results with "seite", but also "Nachrichtenseite" or "seitenweise", for example. Does anyone know how to type this ? The asterisk and any other wildcard characters I know of don't seem to work.

Thanks a million.

Sabine


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Jack Doughty  Identity Verified
United Kingdom
Local time: 03:37
Member (2000)
Russian to English
+ ...
How do you access this function? Nov 14, 2009

I have never heard of Google's "search within a website" function and cannot find it.

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Sabine Deutsch  Identity Verified
France
Local time: 04:37
Member (2008)
French to German
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER
site: Nov 14, 2009

You have to type "site:" and then the name of the website without a space between "site:" and the site name, and then a space and the word or string you are looking for. Example:

site:coca-cola.com coke

You can read more about it here : http://google.about.com/od/googlepowersearches/qt/sitesearchdef.htm

It's great, and you can also search for exact expressions using quotation marks. But I can't find how to use wildcards (if this is possible).


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Samuel Murray  Identity Verified
Netherlands
Local time: 04:37
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
+ ...
An idea... Nov 14, 2009


Sabine Deutsch wrote:
I would like to not only get all results with "seite", but also "Nachrichtenseite" or "seitenweise", for example.


I have no idea if this idea would work, but Google can search German sites in English (can't it?), and the English version would likely use separate words. Do you think you can figure out how to search that site in English using English search terms?


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Jessica Noyes  Identity Verified
United States
Local time: 22:37
Member
Spanish to English
+ ...
Control F? Nov 14, 2009

This does not involve Goole, but if you go to the web site you are searching, and hit *Control F* you get a box to fill in with the search term. This gives the desired string of letters, either independently o embedded in other words.

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Sabine Deutsch  Identity Verified
France
Local time: 04:37
Member (2008)
French to German
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER
only on one single page Nov 14, 2009


Jessica Noyes wrote:

This does not involve Goole, but if you go to the web site you are searching, and hit *Control F* you get a box to fill in with the search term. This gives the desired string of letters, either independently o embedded in other words.


Thank you Jessica, but that works only on one page, whereas the google command searches all pages of the web site.


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Sabine Deutsch  Identity Verified
France
Local time: 04:37
Member (2008)
French to German
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER
@Samuel Nov 14, 2009

I'm afraid I dont't exactly understand what you mean. Is it important whether my research is in French, English or German ? What I want is all possible combinations with a given word - typing two separate words isn't exactly the same. But thanks anyway

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Robert Tucker
United Kingdom
Local time: 03:37
German to English
+ ...
Indexing Nov 14, 2009

Possibly search engines do not index on a site by site basis so indexing for substrings would be too great a procedure. If you search for "for" in Google you get "about 9,150,000,000" hits; think how many it might be if you were to be able to search for all words, acronyms, etc containing "for"!

Incidentally, if you install the Google toolbar you can search within a site by going to the site, entering your term and then selecting "Search Site" from the Search drop-down list.


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Alex Lago  Identity Verified
Spain
Local time: 04:37
Member (2009)
English to Spanish
+ ...
Not implemented Nov 14, 2009

That feature is simply not implemented in the site search, you cant do it, you can only find whole words.

Bear in mind that for Google * stands for a word not a letter, so for example typing red * blue gives you red and blue separated by one or more words, but if you type red* you don't get results for words that start with red, you get results for red followed by another word.

The type of search you want can only be done on a per page basis, because in fact when you search in a page Ctrl+F you are using your browser search not Google.

This is something Google just don't implement, at least as far as I now.


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