Google Custom Search for your Website

If you have a big website whether it’s a blog type or just a product website you need an ability for your customers to be able to search for information that might not be readily available from their landing page.

Not only does this help the visitor find what they are looking for but it also provides the site owner with valuable information in terms of product development etc.

Google have always allowed you to add a search box to your website. Traditionally this has enabled your visitors to search either your site with their search terms or the whole of the web. At the same time the presentation is similar to google (although you can change elements of that) together with Adsense ads in the normal places.

Then if your visitors clicks on an ad you get a proportion of the advertising revenues in the normal manner.

Google recently introduced a new “custom search engine” program that you can add to your website. This is a major step forward in that it is you that decides what sites are returned in the results.

You can add hundreds of URLs or you can give certain sites a boost in the results with google providing the “backfill” if no results are available - ie: general websearch.

You can then decide what sites you don’t want appearing in the search. For many years, spammers get high in the search results, and although the search engines are battling away and removing as much as possible, some do remain.

The whole look is completely customizable in terms of look and feel so you can easily integrate this into your site. You can get others to collaborate with you so if they find a resource that’s useful, then they can help build a better search engine.

The google customer search engine or CSE as it is termed, is good for niche areas where it is humans and not machines that mostly decide what sites are best and trusted the most.

So give it a go - more information is at http://www.google.com/coop/cse/overview