New Site Search features, upgrades for Adobe Creative Suite 5

The just-released Adobe® Creative Suite 5 (CS5) now includes a new Community Help application, powered by Google Site Search. It’s an Adobe AIR®-based companion that’s automatically installed as part of any new Adobe CS5 product.

Launched directly from the Help menu of any CS5 product, the Community Help application provides a customized search experience across about 3000 sites. Customers can find fast answers with powerful new options to focus results just on Adobe content, community content, developer resources, and even code samples.

The Adobe development team used the XML API to integrate search results and also create unique innovations such as Code Search. Formerly known as Blueprint (demonstrated at Google I/O last year) this new search option allows Adobe Flash® and Flex developers to search for relevant code samples so that they can write better code, faster.

Community Help can also be used as a standalone application. To give Community Help a try, you can download it from adobe.com.

To learn more about how Adobe Community Help uses Site Search, see our blog post on the Google Enterprise Blog.

Posted by: Rajat Mukherjee, Group Product Manager, Search

Read More

Custom Search now available in Parallels Plesk Panel

Website owners who use Parallels Plesk Panel to manage their hosting and website services can now configure Custom Search and Site Search in a couple of clicks! As announced on the Google Blog, Plesk now offers out-of-box integration with Google Services for Websites.


If you’re one of the millions of webmasters already using Plesk Panel, you can now easily add high-quality search to your websites via the Custom Search page shown above. Since Plesk Panel knows what domains you own, a drop-down list of your domains is conveniently offered for automatic configuration of the search engine, as shown below.


Once you’re done configuring your search engine, you can customize the search experience to match the look and feel of your website. As shown in the screenshot below, Plesk provides links that you can click to directly manage and customize your search engine with the Custom Search control panel -- you will be automatically logged in.


After you decide on the theme and layout for your search, you can get the search code to insert into your website so your users can easily find what they are looking for. Finally, you can also click through from Plesk to access your search statistics. If you want support and more control over advertising, branding, and indexing, you can initiate an upgrade to Site Search right from within Plesk.

We hope this will make it easier for you to manage your site search experience. As always, let us know if you have feedback.

Posted by: Radu Cornea, Software Engineer and Jae Jung, Business Development Manager

Read More

Custom data rendering in results

Since the launch of Custom Search, we've been constantly pushing the customization envelope -- allowing users to tweak ranking, provide refinements, add promotions above results, change the look and feel, select from themes and modify layouts.

We did not stop there. We added support for custom synonyms, and the ability for website owners to mark up their content with structured metadata. With structured Custom Search, you can create results with rich snippets, e.g., thumbnails and actions.

Now, through Custom Search data rendering in the element, we’re providing you the ability to completely customize the layout of each result. With simple inline markup on the search page, you can override result attributes, decide how each result is formatted, control the size and location of thumbnails and highlight result metadata.

The screenshot below shows an example of formatted result blocks for a sample search based on data from Scribd -- thumbnails have been reduced in size, and a new line containing metadata, including an icon for document type, has been inserted into the result.

We hope you’ll use the power of data rendering in your own search. For a step by step guide on how you can control the data rendering in results with the Custom Search Element, please read our post on the Search API blog.

Posted by: David Gibson and Nicholas Weininger, Software Engineers

Read More