Site search for top-level domains on Google search

Restricting search results to a particular site can be a very effective way to narrow down your results, but unfortunately it’s not very easy to use, requiring you to either go through the ‘Advanced Settings’ or manually add the site: operator to the query. It looks like Google recently made some changes to make the feature more prominent. For some top-level domains – I saw it first for YouTube and later for a number of news organizations like The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian and the German Deutsche Welle and even NASA – the one-box triggered by a search for their name now contains a small search box at the bottom; from there the user can immediately start a search inside that particular site. It’s probably safe to assume that users searching for the name of an organization would want to find content from the site and this saves visitors a trip to the home page and the time it takes to track down the native search. There doesn’t seem to be a clear rule for which site this new site-search box is triggered; maybe it’s a feature that is still being tested or it is rolling out to more in the coming days.