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; this saves visitors a trip to the home page and the time used 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 domains in the future.
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