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.

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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.

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