eTools is my general (meta) search engine (it uses Mojeek) and one of the features i find useful is that it provides a list of TLDs that were queried, thus enabling me to quickly filter results by clicking one of them
for example, if shopping in the U.S., filtering by ‘.com’ is often helpful and i don’t need to adjust any of my search settings or dig in a menu to do so
obviously TLD filtering isn’t 100% with CDNs and given that people in other countries can register any domain/TLD, but it’s still an often handy feature for more than just shopping
Whether all UK gouvernemental websites are neatly organised under gov.uk or not, I can assure you that not all organisations aren’t that organised. And what if I don’t know the organisation I’m looking for. Many times I’m trying to find an organisation with authority on a particular subject in a specific country. The TLD filter might not be 100% flawless, but I feel that it would give me a better starting point. Especially when going through information in a language used by multiple countries.
I found out from that blog post that it’s actually possible to search by TLDs in Mojeek using the site: operator, which is something I didn’t know I wanted. If I only wanted to find only pages that are hosted on sites with a TLD of .org for the term Privacy Guides, I would search:
site:org privacy guides
Then only.org sites will be shown in the results. If I wanted only sites with a TLD of .com, I search:
site:com privacy guides
Then only .com sites will be shown in the results.
But what if I want to find .org and .com sites in the same search result? Is it even possible to filter multiple TLDs in the same query? I’ve tried multiple site: operators but that doesn’t seem to work.
A list of TLDs returned from the query would be nice too, but being able to filter multiple TLDs in one query is my first concern!
Mojeek supported ‘site:TLD’ for some time i believe, but having the TLDs in a clickable list format is even easier, plus it can sometimes be handy to see what TLDs returned results and how many they returned
as for searching multiple TLDs, i seem to recall i, or someone, may have brought that up in the past and that, too, could be useful, especially for ignoring COM TLDs, but i suppose a potential downside to that is that there’s so many TLDs now
A search with this will, as you’d expect, remove any .com, .co.uk, .net, or .org returns. If you use this method and create anything interesting then it’s much appreciated if you share it. No problem if you’d prefer not to.
