University Searches

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High school seniors take note: Google has your search engine. The University specialty searches let you rummage through a single university’s Web site with the power of Google’s search algorithms and operators.

University search operates differently than the other specialty searches described in this chapter. Google does not aggregate many university sites for searching. And this is not a search engine for getting information about universities in general. Instead, Google has actually created dozens of small search engines, each dedicated to a single university Web domain.

Useful? Well . . . this specialized search helps if you repeatedly search in a certain college site. Or, if you learn the URL syntax I divulge in the first section of this chapter, you can seamlessly surf around from one specialty university engine to another.

Remember 

You can avoid the inconvenient trip to Google’s university search pages by using the site operator, assuming you know a university URL. Virtually all university site domains end with the .edu extension, so you need to know the primary domain name, which is often easy to guess. Let’s say you want to search for keywords matching inside Princeton’s site. A simple (and correct) guess of Princeton’s domain is princeton.edu. So this keyword string
admissions policies site:www.princeton.edu

gets you the links you want from the Google home page or Toolbar.

Remember, also, that you can conduct a search across all educational domains by using the .edu extension with the site operator, like this:

undergraduate stress site:edu

But let’s not diverge too far from the straight and narrow. You can always approach the university specialty search sites the way Google intended:

1. Go to the following page:

   www.google.com/options/universities.html

2. Click the university link you want to search.

   All the universities links are contained on this single, long page. Scroll down or click an alphabet link to leap ahead.

3. On the resulting search page, launch your search in the regular fashion.

   All results links point to pages in that university’s Web site.

Not all colleges and universities are represented in these search engines, by a long stretch. I sometimes visit Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, and am disappointed that it’s missing from Google’s college list. But this is when using the site operator is handy; because I know the Rollins domain is rollins.edu, I can search it from Google’s home page or the Toolbar at any time.

Remember 

The university search engines are not affiliated with the universities. Go directly to the university Web site for a glossier presentation of the school.

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