I just did a search for the March of Dimes this morning and saw something in the Google SERPs that I had never seen before. In addition to the normal blue title tag link and a series of site links, there was an additional search box that allows for searching for a term within the actual site listed in the search results. That’s hard to explain so here’s a picture for clarity.
At fist glance, I thought the search box was using the March of Dimes’ website search box since they have a site search box at the top left position of their home page. It looked like Google just pulled down that piece of functionality. But that’s not the case. It turns out that search box in the Google search results listing performs the following query: [search term site:sitename.com] which is using a Google search to look for a specific search term within a given domain.
I don’t think this is going to send shock waves around the world but it is an interesting way for Google to allow for the exposing of more advanced search techniques to users who would not otherwise have the savvy to execute such searches. Apparently Google is expanding their sitelinks to include more ways to get to specific parts of a website. Here is a link to the blog post about their expanded sitelinks program.
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