Home delivery of Custom Search to webmasters

Posted by: Radu Cornea, Software Engineer and Rajat Mukherjee, Group Product Manager

Until today, when you wanted to add Google Custom Search to your site, you had to head directly to our Custom Search Engine site. Although creating your own Google-powered search engine only takes a few minutes, we thought it might be easier if we delivered this functionality right to where many of you manage your sites online. Choice is a beautiful thing.

If you own a website hosted on IPOWER, StartLogic, PowWeb, FatCow, BizLand, EasyCGI and several other web hosting providers, you can now configure Custom Search right in your hoster's management console - these hosters now support both Webmaster Tools and Custom Search. It's like having pizza delivered to your door instead of having to drive over to the pizza parlour!

When you sign up for the service, you get the following benefits, all from the comfort of your hoster's control panel:

• a Google account is automatically created for you - you don't have to remember additional passwords or login to use these Google services
• you can generate search engines for your websites by simply identifying your domains
  
• shortcuts are provided to manage your Webmaster Tools account and your Custom Search Engines
• Sitemaps for URLs on your sites can be automatically submitted to Webmaster Tools for better indexing on Google.com
• your Custom Search engines will automatically recognize and use the submitted Sitemaps for enhanced indexing coverage
• you can make money by associating your Adsense publisher ID with your search engines and sharing advertising revenue with Google
  
• you can upgrade your search engines to use Site Search for further control over branding, presentation (via XML results) and On-Demand indexing

If your site is hosted by one of the above providers, give it a try - go to your hoster's console and add a search box to your site if you don't already have one. High quality search improves user experience, and also directly increases user engagement and improves conversions on web sites.

Additionally, let us know if there are things about this integrated service offering that we can improve. Our programmer's guide provides more details about the new Custom Search APIs that allow programmatic creation and management of Custom Search engines. If you are a web site hoster interested in incorporating these Google webmaster services into your platform, please contact us.