You will often have to try a different way of finding UK only sites depending on which search engine you are using.

It's often useful to try and find sites just in the UK or you may get swamped by information from other countries.

Let's say you are looking for an online pet store to buy your cat food from - you are not going to want your moggy's lunch to arrive by post all the way from a store in Timbuktu!

What is UK only?

Firstly you need to understand what you mean by a UK site. Don't forget that UK companies may not have a .uk address but still be in the UK.

For example, if you type www.bbc.com you'll still come to the BBC's site in London.

Quick and Easy ways

The easiest way with most search engines is just to write 'uk' next to the word or words you are searching for. For example, if I wanted to get my cat food from a shop in the UK I'd write:

Another simple trick works surprisingly often, particularly for large multinational companies. If you go to a site like, say, www.microsoft.com try the same address but with the .co.uk ending instead.

You may well find pages specially written for the UK with UK contact addresses. It may also download faster as their computer will be closer to you.

Search Engine Options

It's also quite easy to find UK only sites with Yahoo! The trick is to use www.yahoo.co.uk rather than www.yahoo.com. Then when you are searching for websites, you can select the 'UK only' option below the search box.

Even if you don't do this, www.yahoo.co.uk will automatically put the UK sites higher up the list of links.

Yahoo! will find sites that are geographically in the UK without worrying whether their web addresses end in .com or .uk.

Yahoo! isn't the site which does this. Altavista also have a 'UK' option.