Ads now in harmony with search results

Posted by: Tom Duerig, Software Engineer

Many folks have pointed out that all the results on the page -- both the search results and the advertisements -- should be appropriately customized so that the ads are in sync with the search results. We are happy to tell you that this is now indeed the case. Keywords that you use to tune search results will also be used to tune the ads.

To demonstrate the power of keywords for tuning ads, we've created 3 search engines. Note the differences in ads when we search for [leash] on all three:

A search engine about children, with the keywords [child children]:


A search engine about dogs, with the keywords [dog dogs]:


And, a search engine about surfing, with the keywords [surf surfing]:


So, keywords are even more important than before to your search engine. Make sure that you choose the keywords that provide the best overall search experience!

Read More

Custom Search in your language of choice

Posted by Matt Wytock, Software Engineer

Since we launched Google Custom Search last year, webmasters and businesses around the world have been able use specific language controls to build customized search experiences. However, the Custom Search administration console was only available in English -- until now. Starting today, the Custom Search platform supports 40 languages in close to 80 countries worldwide.

Webmasters can use CSE to create tailored search experiences on community web sites; businesses can add hosted site search to their web sites; users can add search to their blogs and web pages; and developers can build search right into their applications with the Custom Search APIs. And there's no software to install or hardware to maintain. Custom Search engines can be built in minutes and are easy to customize and manage. You can also control the appearance of the search results to match the look and feel of your web site. Now, you can administer your favo(u)rite CSE in the language of your choice.

Custom Search is available as a free, ads-supported version, and through Custom Search Business Edition (CSBE). With CSBE, further customization of search results is possible using an XML API, and ads are optional. CSBE offers options for email and phone support. This launch also brings Custom Search Business Edition (CSBE) to your country. So if you're looking for fast, easy and relevant search for your website in your language, you'll be pleased with this launch.

As always, we'd love your feedback. Visit our User Group to tell us more about your Custom Search implementation.

Read More

Custom Search Results Overlay

Posted by: Matt Wytock, Software Engineer

The ability to integrate Custom Search with your site is an important feature , and we recently added a new option to the Code tab that makes this integration easier. Using AJAX techniques, you can now get your search results in an overlay that appears on top of the page containing the search box. Here's an example.

Go to the Code tab of your search engine's control panel and select "Host results on a non-Google site" and "overlay" to get this new code.

Behind the scenes, this is powered by the AJAX Search API, which gives you complete control of your search results and is easy to use with Custom Search.

Read More

Custom Search for Salesforce Developers

Posted by: Ryan Pollock, Product Marketing

I recently met with Adam Gross, VP of Developer Relations at Salesforce.com, to hear how developer.salesforce.com uses Google Custom Search. The company is building a community and knowledge base for developers on its Apex platform, and needs a search engine across a variety of content sites, including blogs and wikis. Adam says that Custom Search Business Edition is ideal for their needs, since it's easy to search multiple sites and access search results through an XML API. From the time he learned about Custom Search Business Edition, Adam says it only took a few days to install and create a look and feel for search results that matches the rest of the site.

To hear the story in Adam's own words, check out this video.

And if you're interested in hearing more about our work with Salesforce, we're at their Dreamforce conference this week, so come by to see us.

Read More

Better search results

Posted by Tom Duerig, Software Engineer

We've implemented two frequently-requested features that we think will improve the quality of results in your Custom Search Engine.

1. Keywords now have a much stronger effect on Custom Search results. This helps give better targeted results and more flexibility than before. You can change your search engine's keywords in the "Basics" tab of your search engine's control panel. If you don't like the effect that keywords have your search results, you can also remove them.

Compare the results on this yoga search engine when looking for a "mat" with and without the keyword "yoga" --

with keywords:
http://www.google.com/cse?q=mat&cx=005239880967462049052%3A412vkh_dcla

without keywords:
http://www.google.com/cse?q=mat&cx=005239880967462049052:mdwcyik6y9m

2. For the XML hackers, FILTER labels now are effected by scores and weights just like BOOST labels. This simplifies rearranging your search results so that the content you care about comes up first. In order to prioritize a set of pages, give annotations for those pages' higher scores.

Compare the results of using scores in this vision search engine to prioritize *.ucsd.edu/* over other schools.

with scores (XML definition):
http://www.google.com/cse?q=camera&cref=http://www.google.com/cse/samples/ucsdvision.xml

without scores (XML definition):
http://www.google.com/cse?q=camera&cref=http://www.google.com/cse/samples/ucsdvision-noscores.xml

As always, feel free to give us your feedback in the discussion group.

Read More

Additional Capacity for Business

By: Matt Wytock

In July, we launched Custom Search Business Edition, which those of you who are webmasters and product developers at companies can use to easily set up an ads-free search engine for your websites and completely customize the look and feel of search results through an XML API.

Earlier, the online checkout process allowed purchases for search of up to 50,000 web pages. A number of businesses asked us about site search for larger sites, so now we have expanded the capacity of Custom Search Business Edition. We've introduced two new plans that you can purchase online:

• Search up to 100,000 web pages: $850 per year
• Search up to 300,000 web pages: $2,250 per year

If you want to search more than 300,000 pages, contact us .

You can convert your existing Custom Search Engine to the Business Edition , or you can create a new Business Edition search engine.

Read More

Now CSE for businesses

Posted by: Patrick Riley, Software Engineer

Ever since we launched Custom Search Engine (CSE), businesses of all sizes have been talking to us about specific features, more flexibility on presentation, and tighter integration with their websites and internal databases. We've heard you! Over the past year, we've launched powerful features, including improved language support, statistics and Linked CSEs. We've made Custom Search APIs available to developers, so that nifty search-enabled applications can be built atop the Custom Search platform.

Today, we're announcing Custom Search Business Edition (CSBE), an offering tailored to businesses that want more control over the search experience on their site. Search results can now be delivered through XML, offering further presentation control and flexibility to business users. Businesses now have the option to turn off ads. And CSBE provides options for email and phone support and Google branding is optional for business customers.

CSBE builds on the same foundation as CSE and offers all the benefits of Google search technology -- powerful algorithms, scale, reliability, performance and most importantly, world class search results.

You can directly sign-up for a new CSBE or convert your existing CSE (new Business tab on the control panel) to Business Edition for as low as $100 per year.

Read More

Search your blog world

Posted by: Matt Wytock and Patrick Riley, Software Engineers


With our launch of Linked Custom Search Engines (CSEs) we made it possible for developers to construct CSEs on the fly.
Using the Custom Search APIs, you can now dynamically construct CSEs, and Google will automatically update and maintain them for you.

You may already know how you can use our APIs to create innovative search-enabled applications. Today, we're delivering a Google Search widget for Blogger built using the AJAX Search API. Configure this widget on your Blogger blog to immediately search not just your blog posts, but across all the link lists/blogrolls you've set up on your blog and the links you've made from your posts -- in other words, the world around your blog!

Try out the Search Box widget at Blogger's experimental site, draft.blogger.com. Once you've logged in and configured the widget, visitors to your blog will see a search box there. The search experience inherits your blog's look and feel, and is uniquely flavored around pages you've linked to from your blog.

To add the widget:

1. Edit your blog's layout.
   
2. Click on "Add a page element", and configure the "Search Box" widget.
   

Your link lists will automatically show up as optional tabs for your search; you can decide which ones you want to configure.
Preview the search experience and save your changes. Your blog is instantly custom-search-enabled.

If you're not using Blogger, you can still use our AJAX Search API to put Linked CSEs on your website.

Let us know what you think, and what CSE-enabled applications you're working on.

Read More

Custom Search Engine APIs

Posted by: Matt Wytock, Software Engineer

A couple of weeks ago we blogged about a new feature and a new kind of Custom Search Engine (CSE) that you could create on the fly. Today, we thought we'd dig a bit deeper and describe the underlying infrastructure that powers this. With our new Linked CSEs, we are exposing the API to create and control CSEs.

Until now, you created a CSE either by using the wizard or by writing an XML file and uploading it to Google (via the "Advanced" tab on the control panel). To change any aspect of the CSE, you had to either use the control panel or upload the new XML specification. This imposed several limitations:

• Creating and maintaining a CSE was a manual process.
• It was difficult to create a large number of CSEs.
• It was difficult to use other data sources such as iCal, RSS, Google Base, etc. to programmatically create CSEs.

The search box code for these CSEs (found on the "Code" tab in the control panel) includes a "cx" parameter with every search request (for example, <input type="hidden" name="cx" value="005946352831473999820:qs1idu8ptku" />), which specifies an internal identifier for the CSE.

Linked CSEs overcome these limitations. In short, you can now specify your CSE using a "cref" parameter that points to a URL, anywhere on the web. You update this URL at your end and don't have to upload it or edit your CSE using our tools. The URL can take arguments to produce dynamic CSEs, based on the current page, the current user visiting your site, etc. You can see this in action on our "on the fly" demo page: when you type "http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~russell/ai.html" in the form text field, the javascript on that page constructs a "cref" parameter that contains http://www.google.com/cse/tools/makecse?url=http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~russell/ai.html. This URL (visit it!) contains an XML specification for a CSE. You can use any script you want, or reference a static file, when creating your CSE. And there's nothing special about our makecse example script: we're hoping that our developers and the developer community will build many other such CSE-generating tools.

How does this work? With Linked CSEs, you designate a CSE specification URL with each search request (as a hidden form field in your search box HTML code). Google retrieves the CSE specification from the URL when your user searches in the CSE. We cache and refresh the results so that only the first search to your CSE incurs any delay. The flexibility to specify how your search engine should behave, just when your user is doing the query, using whatever data sources you want, opens up many possibilities:

• You can use our makecse tool to generate CSEs from different sources of links:
  • HTML: http://www.cs.berkeley/~russell/ai.html
    
  • RSS: http://reddit.com/.rss
    
  • ATOM: http://lipstadt.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
    
  • OPML: http://medicalconnectivity.com/gems/blogroll.opml
    
• You can combine multiple sources of links using our makeannotations tool and the <Include> tag. For example, its easy to create a search engine from the links on the front pages of techmeme, slashdot and digg.
  
• You can write your own tools to produce <Annotations /> XML from other data sources such as Google Calendar or iCal feeds, Google Base or any other structured source of information.
  
• You can automatically generate any number of CSEs, each possibly tuned to a particular user. For example, we've created a sample that builds a CSE from a user's digg.com friend network and submissions using the Digg API. Try it out and view the source. This makes use of two simple python CGI scripts:
  • diggannos.py generates <Annotations> from the specified user's submitted stories
    
  • diggcse.py generates <GoogleCustomizations> from the specified user's friend network. For each friend, it generates an <Include> element pointing to the appropriate diggannos.py URL

You can test any Custom Search Engine XML by going to http://www.google.com/coop/cse/cref and entering the URL. Putting a search box on your site is as easy as copying a small bit of HTML code and modifying the "cref" parameter.

Linked CSEs are a very big step for Google Custom Search. We hope you will find them as cool as we do. As always, thank you for your support and keep the feedback coming.

Read More

Finding your community

Posted by: Vrishali Wagle, Software Engineer

Since we launched Custom Search Engines (CSEs) last year, we have seen search engines created on a variety of topics. Many of these search engines are open to volunteers and would love to have you contribute to them.

Now, it's easier for you to find all of these CSEs. Go to the Featured Examples page and type relevant words into the search box at the top of the page. We will search for these words in the fields for the search engine's name, description, keywords, and popular queries. If you're interested in finding a search engine to contribute to, search specifically for search engines that allow volunteers. For instance, if you're most interested in non-profit organizations, search only for non-profit search engines. You get the gist.

All of this searching over search engines is done via Google Base. It's the place to submit your content and make it searchable and accessible on Google. You can look at the hundreds of custom search engines that are related to cricket, podcasts and lyrics. We also have search engines on pet rats and many flavors of legal search.

Please note that only a small fraction of existing CSEs are included in this search. We've filtered search engines based on quality, recency, traffic and other metrics.

We hope this new Custom Search Engine search feature enables you and other CSE creators to find search engines more easily, and that it ultimately provides you with better access to information in your community.

Read More

Custom Search on the fly

Posted by: Rajat Mukherjee, Product Manager

Starting today, there's a new feature that makes Custom Search Engines (CSEs) even easier to create and keep up to date.

You can now create a CSE by simply placing a small piece of tailored code on a page on your site. With that one piece of code, Google's search technology will automatically include in your new CSE all of the sites you have linked to from that page, creating a dynamic, powerful and tailored search experience really quickly. Moreover, your new CSE will update itself periodically to include any new links added to that page.

So, if you have a blog or a directory-like site and don't feel like listing all of the URLs you want to search across, you can leave the work to us. With this new feature we'll automatically generate and update your CSE for you. For example, try the query 'sculpture' on this CSE dynamically created from a page of links to kids museums or the query 'planning' on the search engine about Artificial Intelligence we created from the page of links at Berkeley.

Pretty cool, eh? We think so too. There are many powerful things you can do with this new feature, and in the near future we'll be talking about different possibilities. In the meantime, however, feel free to get your dynamic Custom Search Engine up and running. We'll be back in an instant.

Keep the feedback and great ideas coming!

Read More

Star Power

Posted by: Jay Davies, Community Manager


If you've created a Custom Search Engine you've likely encountered the term 'URL patterns': the method for specifying sites and pages to include in a search engine. You can create a Custom Search Engine without ever giving URL patterns much thought, but there's added control that comes with understanding how they work and how best to use them. To that end, here are a few tips on creating useful URL patterns.

The simplest type of pattern is the URL of a specific page. You can use an asterisk (or star, in techie vernacular) as a wild card in your pattern to specify a swath of URLs by identifying their common characters. Here's how it works: rather than add each page of www.site.com to your search engine, you can merely add www.site.com/* and we will include every URL that begins with www.site.com. Similarly, rather than individually adding each subdomain of site.com, you can use the star to include them all: *.site.com will apply to www.site.com, server.site.com, etc.

Because most users adding sites to their search engines expect the subpages to be included, we've made the addition of the star the default behavior. This is what we mean in the Sites tab of the control panel when we say 'Include all pages whose address contains this URL.' If you leave that option selected, we will add a star to the end of whatever URL you provide. Additionally, if your URL is just a domain (like site.com/), not including a sub-domain (like www.site.com/ or server.site.com/), we will add a star at the beginning. This means:

• site.com/ becomes *.site.com/*
• server.foo.com/ becomes server.foo.com/*
• othersite.co.uk/ becomes *.othersite.co.uk/* (yep, we handle two level top-level domains correctly)
  

If you'd like to control exactly where stars get added, you can select 'Include just the specific page or URL pattern I have entered.'

Another way to use patterns is to identify and distill common characters among a set of pages you'd like to include in your index. For example, if I know that all car review pages on my favorite consumer reviews site contain the words 'car' and 'reviews' in the URL, I can create the pattern www.reviewsite.com/*reviews*cars and include these pages. (I just need to be careful that only the pages I want contain these terms, or I may include more than I bargained for.) These types of patterns are especially useful when creating search refinements.


There is also one more application of the star, which is before a top-level domain like .edu or .ca. One use of this pattern is for when you'd like to refine a search by country: for example, you can create a pattern like *.ca and refine your search to Canadian web sites only. That said, you cannot otherwise insert a star into the second-level domain, such as www.*.com or www.dogs*.com. For a few more concrete examples of URL patterns check out our documentation.

The careful creation of URL patterns allows you greater control over the content of your Custom Search Engines, and can be particularly helpful when breaking up a site's content for refinements. Patterns may also help reduce the overall number of sites in your Custom Search Engine account, so look for redundant URLs that can be included more economically by the use of, shall we say, a little star power.

Read More

Bigger and Better Group

Posted by: Christine Moschella, Online Operations

Good news, Custom Search Engine fans! We've redesigned the discussion group just for you; in particular, we've added categories to make information easier to find, including several sections dedicated to CSE features and options.

We invite you to join the Google Custom Search Help Group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-custom-search to ask questions, find answers, and lend your expertise to other Google Custom Search Engine users. Our own Custom Search Guides will also be posting to this group from time to time to help facilitate the discussion with tips and clarifications.

As for the original Co-op group, we've moved it into a subcategory of the new Custom Search group and archived the posts. You can still search for topics and read posts, but you won't be able to post new messages to the group. We hope you'll find the right category for your questions in the new Custom Search group.

Before posting to the group, try searching for the answer to your question in the FAQ or in the group archives. Also, please review the Custom Search Help Charter for more details about the group, including posting tips and etiquette. We hope to have you as an active group member soon!

Read More

Show popular queries on your site

Posted by: Matt Wytock, Software Engineer

We've just added the ability to show popular queries for your Custom Search Engine, so that your users can see what others have been searching for on your site. Popular queries are updated daily, and the code snippet dynamically shows the most recent data.

To show your CSE's popular queries, go to the "My search engines" page (after you've signed in) and click on the "statistics" link. Cut and paste the popular queries code where you would like them to appear on your website. You can also subscribe to the feed for your CSE popular queries using your favorite feed reader -- the link to the feed is also available on the statistics page.

Read More

Better branding part II

Posted by: Jennifer Hyman, Product Marketing Manager

In tandem with the search results branding changes, we've just updated and implemented new search box branding for CSEs as well. You can now select from 7 different search box branding options to fit the look and feel of your site. You'll find these different branding options on the Code page in your Custom Search Engine Control Panel. If you were previously using the watermark branding option that sits within the search box, we have automatically updated this logo to match the new updated branding.

We're always working to improve and enhance CSEs look, feel and functionality, and hope you agree that this new branding is a step in the right direction. To learn more about CSE branding, visit our branding guidelines. And as always, please keep the feedback coming.

Read More

Better branding part I

Posted by: Jennifer Hyman, Product Marketing Manager

In our constant quest to simplify things, we've made a small, but important change to the language you see from Google on Custom Search Engine search results pages. Now, instead of the long string of text that previously said "Google search results customized by [XYZ site] using Google Co-op," you'll see a small Google logo with the words Custom Search. We think this new branding is an improvement both in design and clarity -- not only do the search results look better, but it should be clearer to your users that they're benefiting from Google CSE.

Later this week, we plan to roll out some additional branding options for your search boxes, and hope you like our first attempt to improve the look and feel and of your CSE.

Read More

Site search gets supplemental

Posted by: Patrick Riley, Software Engineer

One of the common uses of Custom Search Engines is to provide site search. A number of users have suggested that we can improve Custom Search for this application by also including supplemental results in Custom Search Engine's results. We put fewer constraints on what pages go into our supplemental index and therefore there are many pages which are available only there. This is our first step to give you more results. If your search engine operates as a filter and has three sites or less or your search engine includes the whole web, you'll get supplemental results as well. For example, take a look at the Hanayama Puzzle Store search engine I've created. Hanayama makes some great puzzles, but they aren't always so easy to find. The queries "hanayama baroq" (possibly my favorite puzzle of all time) and "hanayama laby" only return supplemental results in this search engine. Check out the FAQ entry about supplemental results for more information.

Read More

Here's some love for our Custom Search friends

Posted by: Mike Cancel, Community Manager


Since it launched in October, we've been pleasantly surprised by the nice ecosystem that has built up around Custom Search Engines. Here are some of the more interesting resources we've found outside Google that you might find useful. Happy V-Day from us to you!

Tools
Add CSE to browser (firefox and IE)

Importing del.icio.us bookmarks for CSE (aka Vik's tool)

Lijit: Personal Network Search


Lists
Finding Google Custom Search Engines

List Your Custom Search Indexes


Directories
CSE Links Directory

CustomSearchEngine.com - the directory of Google Custom Search Engines

Guide to Custom Search Engines

Workarounds
Using ASP.NET site with CSE

Google Custom Search Results Page on Your Wordpress with Adsense Deluxe

How to save search queries on Google Custom Search Engine

Google Co-op - An Intro & Some Insider Hacks

Read More

New statistics page

Posted by: Matt Wytock, Software Engineer

We've added a new statistics page so you can see what people are searching for on your Custom Search Engine -- information such as overall traffic to your search engine and popular queries is now available. And you can view this info by day, week, month -- or even the entire lifetime of your search engine.

So check it out by going to the My search engines page and follow the "statistics" link next to the name of your search engine.

Read More

The top CSEs

Posted by: Jennifer Hyman, Product Marketing Manager

You may have been wondering how your CSE is performing and how it compares to those other people are creating. The first step in sharing Custom Search metrics with you is the Most Popular list of Custom Search Engines, as defined by volume of queries. This list spans a variety of sites: large, small and across industries and topics. You'll see search engines built for techies, music lovers, sports fans, climate scientists, universities and more. Individual site owners and large organizations are seeing success with their CSEs.

We plan to update this list every couple of weeks so you can gauge the activity of the Custom Search community as well as how your CSE is performing. Stay tuned for more such metrics updates, too.

Read More