There's no doubt that Google has made our lives infinitely easier. If I had to guess, I probably use Google search at least a dozen times a day. Sometimes more. In fact, many Web sites today feature Google Site Search, a hosted search solution that allows users to search the contents of a particular Web site right from the site's home page. But many great Web sites still don't have an integrated search tool.

There is, however, an easy way to search a specific Web site for the information you're looking for right from the Google home page. Let's use the Real Simple Web site for example. This site is full of great information, from shopping lists to recipes and home inventory worksheets. So how can you find what you're looking for fast?

Follow these simple steps:

1. Visit the Google home page

2. Type in what you're looking for (your search term) followed by a space and the word "site" (no quotations) then a colon. Let's use chicken recipes on Real Simple.com as an example. You would type in:

chicken recipe[space]site:

3. Follow the colon with URL you want to search

chicken recipe[space]site:www.realsimple.com

4. Note the results are limited to the site URL you provided. No other results are included.

Using this example, my search for a chicken recipe on RealSimple.com generated 568 results. A generic search for chicken recipes generated 10,100,000 results! If I wanted to review every chicken recipe on the Internet, the latter search would be the wise choice. But oftentimes I'm looking for something I saw on a specific Web site at an earlier date (a sweater on J.Crew, say, or the updated schedules for summer camp). This little trick saves a lot of time.

What tricks do you use to simplify your searches?