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As I indicated in a previous post, searching for deals in Google is fundamental to saving money on-line. Search for “<some retailer.com> coupon” in Google and you have a good chance of finding a money-saving promotion code to use before checking out at that retailer. By being a little more sophisticated in your Google searches, it’s possible to unearth some deals on certain sites that may not be available to the general public.

I learned of this technique from greensboring.com. She came up with a way to find American Airlines promotion codes through Google searches. It should be noted that these codes are not available by browsing from the AA.com home page. The codes themselves are found on pages that are likely linked in targeted communications to specific customers. Here’s how she found it:

1. Limit the search to the company’s website with the keyword “site:” In this example, you would use “site:aa.com”.
2. Then (and here’s the key) find a search word in the URL (the line of text in the browser’s address bar when you’re in a specific page) common in pages with offer info — in this case pages describing the “terms and conditions” of these offers — by using the “inurl:” keyword. The author at greensboring.com found that the terms and conditions pages at AA.com all had the word “discountcode” in the URL, so she included “inurl:discountcode” in her search. The trick is finding a page (presumably one linked from the home page) for an offer that may not be applicable to you and try to find a word or words that is common to similar offer-related pages. In this case, “discountcode” is fairly obvious.
3. Put it together, and add search terms specific to deals you want. In this example, if I want to fly to O’Hare Airport and want offers that include routes to ORD, I can zero in on those offer pages with the Google search string, “site:aa.com inurl:discountcode ORD” (in fact, that search yielded a page with a coupon code for 5% off the route I wanted, but unfortunately the date restriction of the offer was just outside the range I needed).

This approach takes some legwork, and isn’t likely to mine discount code gold out of very many websites, but it you may get lucky and find some great discounts that virtually unknown to the rest of the world, even to veteran discount detectives. For another example, check out the search phrase used to uncover some great Avis discount codes from educational sites in the greensboring.com article: “inurl:edu AWD discount avis car rental”. Very smart.

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