A new and easy way to add new pages to your Custom Search Engine’s index

Our users have been telling us that while they love the concept of on-demand indexing, manually entering URLs or keeping a Sitemap up to date is too cumbersome.  A new year brings a new and improved solution.  If you are a Webmaster Tools verified site owner and have a page that links to your site’s latest content, simply provide us with that page’s URL and we will periodically visit it to discover your site’s new content.

For example, as the owners of this blog, we can provide the URL of the blog’s landing page, googlecustomsearch.blogspot.com, to our CSE.  It will then periodically visit that URL and add any new links to content on this blog to our CSE’s index.  Since this URL automatically links to all new content on this blog, our CSE’s index will always automatically get updated.

You can provide a URL(s) to your CSE via the URLs linked from a page feature in the Indexing page of your CSE’s Control Panel.  Note that this feature is only for the discovery of new content and does not refresh content that has already been indexed.  

To learn more about URLs linked from a page, please visit our help center. Let us know what you think in our discussion forum.

Posted by: Liqian Luo, Software Engineer

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Custom Search JavaScript API is now fully documented!

The Custom Search engineers spent 2011 launching great features. But we still hear from our users that our documentation could do with improvement. We hear you. Today we’re launching some updates to our docs:

• Comprehensive JavaScript reference for the Custom Search Element. We’ve completely overhauled our Custom Search Element API documentation to provide a comprehensive overview of all the JavaScript methods available. We can’t wait to see what you build with it.


• More languages. The Help Center is now available in Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish.


• Easier navigation and cleaner design. We’ve reorganized the Help Center to make it easier to find the information you’re looking for. Navigation is simpler and more streamlined. Individual articles have been revised and updated, and designed to be more readable.

Documentation is an ongoing effort, and we’ll be continuing to improve both our Help Center and our developer documentation. If you have comments or suggestions, we’d love to see them in our user forum.

Posted by: Riona MacNamara, technical writer

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