Search by Domain

Posted on July 2, 1999

You're on deadline and you want to know about the latest British academic research on Mad Cow Disease. Your government has signed a trade deal with a small African country and you want to know what people there think about it.

Searching by country can be a frustrating experience on the web. You can always put in search terms like:

+"mad cow disease" +England

or:

+exports +Tanzania

But remember, those keywords mean you are looking for those exact words on the web site and most web pages in England or Tanzania don't have the name of the country written on them.

The solution? Search by domain.

DOMAIN CODES

Every country on the web has its own domain. Some are obvious - the United Kingdom is .uk (for example, www.bbc.co.uk), Canada is .ca (for example, www.aircanada.ca) and France (www.lemonde.fr). Others are less so: .ir is not Ireland, it's Iran. Ireland is .ie

The US, because it so dominates the web, uses .com for all commercial sites and many other web pages around the world also use this domain.

DIFFERENT SEARCH ENGINES

AltaVista (www.altavista.com) offers the easiest way to search by domain. You simply put in the keywords you are looking for, follwed by domain, then a colon, then the domain code. So a hunt for Bed and Breakfast vacation spot near Hyde Park would read:

+"bed and breakfast" +"Hyde Park" domain: uk

In AltaVista you can only search for one domain at a time. HotBot (www.hotbot.com) allows some more sophistication, but be sure you go into the HotBot Advanced page.

You'll see a drop-down menu in the search box about half way down the page for Domain. It conveniently allows you to search by geographic region - for example, all of Europe, or all of Asia, or you can type in the domain you want.

HotBot (www.hotbot.com) allows you to search for sub-domains. These are sub-sections of domains. For example, academic sites in the UK are ac.uk, and Nova Scotia sites in Canada at ns.ca.

So our Mad Cow disease research will be much more focussed if we try;

"mad cow disease" domain: ac.uk 

Other search engines, particular for Europe, have easy drop down menus. EuroFerret, InfoSeek UK and Excite UK (all listed on JournalismNet Europe at www.journalismnet.com/europe.htm) allow you to select by country without knowing the domain code.

NOT JUST COUNTRIES

Countries aren't the only domains. Other useful ones to know are:

.edu -- For academic sites in the US only (for instance, www.harvard.edu)

.gov -- For US government sites (such as www.whitehouse.gov)

.mil -- For US military sites

.org -- For non-profit organizations, such as Amnesty International, the United Nations, Greenpeace, etc.

A search for criticism of Burma's human rights record is likely to be more fruitful if you specify you want the non-profit organizations that are in the .org domain such as Amnesty so you could type in AltaVista:

+"human rights" +Burma domain: org

 

A search for AIDS research in US universities can be focused to the .edu domain; a search for American nuclear waste plans can be narrowed to the .mil domain.