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I'm looking for an URL that goes directly to the first Google hit from a certain domain as in "I'm Feeling Lucky" but limited to a certain domain.

I'm using this formula, but it typically doesn't work.

http://www.google.com/search?q=SEARCHTERM%20site:SITEURL&btnI

Edit: It seems to work a lot of the time actually. However, there are quite a few cases in which it will not work.

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5 Answers 5

Reset to default
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Use links like https://www.google.com/search?btnI=1&q=%s site:developer.mozilla.org

btnI=1 makes the difference from a normal request.

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I solved this by switching to an equivalent service by another search engine.

While the formula given in the question often works, Google will sometimes chicken out and go to a regular search results page rather than going directly to the top hit.

DuckDuckGo never chickens out. It always goes to the top hit.

Therefore I am using DuckDuckGo for this particular service from now on.

Here is the formula for DuckDuckGo:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=!ducky+searchterm+site%3Asiteurl

For example:

 https://duckduckgo.com/?q=!ducky+LOL%20Cats+site%3Ayoutube.com

This is where I learned it, by the way.

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  • This doesn't work as a link from an external site.
    – Semra
    Apr 5 at 12:44
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In my experience, using an ordinary "btnI=1&q=" Google URL worked fine in the past. But for a few years I've been experiencing unreliable "lucky" redirects, as noticed by the poster of this question. After some troubleshooting I discovered that one can fix this with a "Referer: http://www.google.com/" header:

w3m -header "Referer: http://www.google.com/" "http://www.google.com/search?ie=ISO-8859-1&hl=en&source=hp&q=happy+nation+lyrics&btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky&gbv=1"

For me, removing the header parameter in the above command causes the redirect not to work. Redirect also breaks if you remove the "www." in the "http://" URL.

I figured this out by comparing the URLs and headers in the HTTP requests generated by manually clicking on the "Lucky" button vs loading the URL directly. https://serverfault.com/questions/504431/human-readable-format-for-http-headers-with-tcpdump (Unfortunately this snooping method only works with HTTP, not HTTPS)

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  • As of October 2019, "Google lucky" URLs sometimes produce a special redirect page, for me at least, that needs extra parsing to get the URL of the top result. I just wrote a script which does this, but it is not very elegant.
    – Metamorphic
    Dec 10, 2019 at 4:16
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Use this one (Twitter as example, you change this to your search words)

http://www.google.com/search?q={twitter}&btnI

To stop the redirect notice use this small extension.

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http://www.google.com/search?q={query}&btnI

Try this one.

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