Google search operator “site:” … how to limit its scope?

Question

Assume there is a website with the domain name baz.tld. It has content. There is also content on subdomains foo.baz.tld and bar.baz.tld, but there is no www.baz.tld subdomain.

The most frequent search operator I use on Google is site: to limit the scope to a particular domain. This works fine when specifying a particular subdomain such as site:foo.baz.tld (which limits search result to that subdomain). But when I give site:baz.tld I end up getting results for foo.baz.tld and bar.baz.tld but the ones for baz.tld end up somewhere towards the end (several pages forward) of the search results.

How can I achieve something like site:foo.baz.tld but limit it to only baz.tld?

Answer 1

I think the closest you can come is to restrict your search to the domain you want, then subtract out the subdomains you don't. For example, compare the results of these two queries:

visual studio site:microsoft.com

visual studio site:microsoft.com -site:msdn.microsoft.com

Google doesn't support wildcarding in site: keyword as in -site:*.microsoft.com, so you'll have to subtract each subdomain you'd like excluded one-at-a-time.