Help me find (custom search engine edition)

September 29, 2021 4:03 AM

Is there a way to set a Google custom search engine to a specified website and follow links on that website for one hop to return results from those pages as well (/only)

http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/sitemap.html is such a great source - and I'd like to limit results from pages recommended there..

posted by mathiu to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

You can build a custom search engine with sites you choose. But I believe you have to first load the URL for each site into the engine as you are building it.
posted by NotLost at 6:46 AM on September 29, 2021

I'm not aware of a fast way to do that, but you can construct Google searches to limit the scope of the search to a given site or sites:

site:zdnet.com OR site:pcmag.com OR site:computerworld.com apple

Google does have a limitation of 32 words in a search, so you can't add every useful site, but maybe you could bookmark searches like the one I built for different areas of interest (ie computer, botany, cyborgology).
posted by gregr at 7:01 AM on September 29, 2021

If it is just one site you want to search and you use Chrome, you can edit your settings like so.
posted by ellerhodes at 7:04 AM on September 29, 2021

I don't know about Chrome, but Firefox lets you define search keywords as shortcuts to launching search engines. Which means you can go to the address bar, type your keyword followed by your search terms, and it'll feed your search terms straight to whatever search engine you like. The following might seem a bit convoluted, and it's not very useful for mobile browsing. But on desktop, I find this really convenient (and not actually hard to set up despite the long explanation).

Basically: suppose I wanted a search keyword that restricts results to metafilter.com and its subsites. What I'd do is go to google.com, right-click inside the search box, and select "Add a keyword for this search." In the dialog that comes up, I'd enter gm (for example) in the keyword field.

At this point, if I go to the address bar and type gm beans I'll just get plain old google search results for beans. To set up the gm keyword to give me only results restricted to metafilter, I'll go to the Bookmarks menu (press Alt to see the menus if you don't by default), choose "Show all bookmarks", find the bookmark with the gm keyword (should be the bottom entry under Bookmarks Menu), and replace the URL in the bookmark with https://www.google.com/search?q=site:metafilter.com+%s. After that, typing gm beans in the address bar should get you straight to beans results only from metafilter. (The way keywords work is they just replace the %s with whatever words come after the keyword.)
posted by trig at 8:21 AM on September 29, 2021 [1 favorite]