Transferring ownership of your Site Search engine

Many of you have requested a simpler process for transferring Google Site Search ownership to a different user. For instance, you may have created, developed and customized your website's search experience under your Google account, but want the long-term management of the search engine to be performed by someone else. In the past, you would have been required to manually export the configuration, import it into a new Site Search instance and then cancel the old instance.

Now, you can very easily transfer the ownership of a Site Search engine to a new user by simply specifying a different Google account email address in the Business Settings tab in the control panel.

Once you’ve provided the appropriate account information for the new administrator account, the following things happen:

• A new Site Search engine is created with the identical configuration as your current Site Search engine.
• The new Site Search engine is owned and can be administered by the new account owner.
• Any unused query quota is transferred to the new Site Search engine.
• The new Site Search engine will show the transfer history in the Business settings in the control panel
• You can still continue to use the old engine, but ads may be displayed alongside search results and XML access is disabled.

Please note that either you or the new admin will also need to update the Search box code to represent the new Site Search engine ID. You can find this ID in the Basics tab in the control panel, marked “Search Engine unique ID”.

We hope this process makes it easier for you to transfer administration capabilities to the appropriate account owners in your organization. For more details, please refer to the articles on transferring ownership, and recommended post-transfer actions in the help center.

As always, we appreciate your feedback in the user forum.

Posted by: Yong Zhu, Software engineer