Google Search Inside of Google Search

After reading a story about the top newspaper websites (thanks to Ed Kohler’s Tweet), I wanted to view the San Francisco Chronicle website since it received an “A” grade. Upon typing in “San Fransisco Chronicle” into my Google search field (bad article, no links!) I saw something I had never came across before. A search feature to search the SF Chronicle site, right from Google.

As you can see, Google is providing a search within a search result. Great feature, especially if you’ve ever used a site search on a content heavy website that sucks (See StarTribune.com’s). My first thought was that the SF Chronicle’s site was using Google site search internally, but they are actually using Yahoo for that.

So I typed in Giants, the hometown baseball team and got over 400,000 results and a mix of types from the SF Chronicle website. Very cool.

So I’m left wondering, how long has this feature been there and are there other sites Google is using this for? I get it for many large newspaper sites, but not when searching for the University of Minnesota or Walmart. Imagine if Google offered this as a “product search” when you search Besy Buy or Walmart, they could then serve up many more PPC ads and probably increase some revenue. It would also irk those being searched … who probably spend big bucks with the G.

Anyway, does anyone have anything else to offer or add on this?