Internet Research with Google Advanced Search

Specifying a domain or site

In its simplest form, the Internet address (URL) of a site classifies it as belonging to a particular type of organisation, and (generally) by country of origin. This information specifies the domain of the site. Examples of the common domains are:

URL ends in:	Domain	Example: with complete URL
.gov.au	Australian government site	Australian Dept. of Foreign Affairs and Trade http://www.dfat.gov.au
.edu.au	Australian educational site	Monash University http://www.monash.edu.au
.com.au	Australian company site	Qantas http://www.qantas.com.au
.org.au	Australian non-commercial organisation	Greenpeace Australia Pacific http://www.greenpeace.com.au

International or United States entities have no country code:

.gov	U.S. government site	Central Intelligence Agency http://www.cia.gov
.com	U.S. based company	IBM http://www.ibm.com
.org	International agency	The United Nations http://www.un.org

For other domain and country codes see: 2-Character Alphabetical Country Codes - Digraphs of All Countries. (Domains are explained in more detail in the Library online tutorial, How to do research on the Internet)

Restricting the search to a particular domain provides a means of focusing on authoritative sources, e.g. .gov.au for official reports and policy information from the Australian government, or .edu.au for reports, working papers and articles published by Australian universities and research centres. The following example demonstrates this.