Restricting web searches to specific sites?

October 8, 2005 12:50 PM

Is there a way to utilize a whitelist of specific sites in either Google or another search engine? The "site:" operator seems either too restrictive (one website) or too expansive (e.g., edu, gov).

A non-working solution to what I want to do would be "query site:website1 site:website2 site:website3". Afterward, I could make a keyword in firefox so that I could avoid having to add in the list of sites every time.

posted by aiko to computers & internet (4 answers total)

Try Rollyo.
posted by skyboy at 12:54 PM on October 8, 2005

Rollyo lets you search up to 30 specific sites at once and everyone's personal site search roll thing is available to everyone else, so you might just find someone covered a subject you're interested in already.
posted by mathowie at 1:09 PM on October 8, 2005

skyboy: Rollyo is nearly an ideal solution. The ability to break up results by site is nice, and I was able to create a firefox bookmark so I can type "r query" in the location bar and utilize the whitelist. The limitation to 25 sites may be a future problem, but not yet. Thank you!
posted by aiko at 1:15 PM on October 8, 2005

You might be able to do something with the google API. I don't know if it exposes more options or not, but you might be able to merge results from multiple queries.
posted by devilsbrigade at 2:08 PM on October 8, 2005