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Build Your Own Google-Powered Search Engine
eastbayted writes "Google has unveiled a free program called Google Customized Search Engine that lets users tailor a search index to their content specifications, InfoWorld reports. You can select keywords for the index, as well as which Web sites will be included or excluded in the search. You also may customize the look and feel of the engine. The trade-off? When you implement the index on your Web site or blog, it will be populated with Google text ads via Google's lucrative AdSense Program. On the plus side, you do get paid for click-throughs."
Sounds like a fantastic product for people who have a legitimate use for it. However, I wonder how many additional 'all spam' sites will be created as a result (e.g. those that have no content other than google ads, links to paid advertisements, etc.).
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What are the differences between this and having your own google mini? Aside from the fact that google profits through text-ads. I assume the differences are many.
To enroll in the Google Custom Search Engine program, go to www.google.com/coop/cse/
To a user it can be useful: it allows for a focused search. Say you're an industrial engineer and want to constrain your search to a topic. But what's critical to the credibility of google is a way for the user to *know* the biases before using the engine!
There's a little site out there called Rollyo or Roll Your Own. It works similarly to this and has been around a while. http://www.rollyo.com/
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Who is stealing from whom in this case? Microsoft has had something very similar on their Live site for a while now.
Isn't this a bit redundant? Don't all high-traffic sites already have their own search, or already have Google's search in them? And a good many sites already use AdSense, so this seems a little odd that Google is searching the deep dark depths of the internet to get their search and ads. But OTOH, this seems perfect for non-high traffic sites that don't have AdSense, but get enough clicks so that a little revenue wouldn't hurt. An interesting move, nonetheless.
This is a great idea! This will empower web site owners to add another dimension of functionality to their websites. Customized search engine. It will provide an avenue for those providing a service to help visitors get more specific search results for thier queries and providers benefit. Sure Google benefits from it with text ads, but you as well benefit. This is part of the brilliance of Google. "You get more from it than we do." You get an additioanl service on your website that is unique to your site and you get a little somethin' somethin' for click revenues. Google, just gets theirs from the click revenues. I would do this.
One day the toilets of the world will rise up... And I'm going to nuke them.
Could a site simply declare itself a not-for-profit operation, and opt-out of the AdSense requirement? Or is Google going to require 501(c)(3) certification or some similar legal status?
If you look at the example given in the article, it says:
So am I the only one who sees how Google can also apply this to ranking websites within their index?
Trying to find reviews of stuff is a real pita on any search engine, you'll usually come up with "buy it for $$$" results. Even if you used all the necessary search filters in google like "-buy -purchase -stock" etc you'd still end up with annoying shop stuff.
I'm currently working on my own version that searches through review sites based on a whitelist approach of only approved sites here. If people want to give me some help on this i'd appreciate it, that way we can filter out all of the spam sites and focus instead on only the good stuff.
Is it just me or is this just a little sugar on top of their site: search keyword?
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Although in the minority I'm sure, I look at Google as the largest scraper of content there is. If you think about it, they give users snippets of your original content and then take that content and use it to deliver targeted advertisements before the user even clicks on your content.
Now, enter the same business model, add some revenue sharing and a whole bunch of smaller players with their own domains armed with CSS stylized IFRAMES and you will see the "authoritative portal/directory sites" grow pretty quickly. As someone who creates his own unique content (with no ads currently), moves like this do make me think twice about the future of search and creating content for other people to scrape and profit from. Sure, I understand the point of "without the search engine no one would ever find my site", but at some point content creators have to worry about others profiting off their efforts (/end violin playing).
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Maybe now I can finally make it to stop showing me results from experts-exchange.com when I'm looking for tutorials!
I will forever be a student.
What would be really interesting is if they implemented a new meta robots tag where you as a website owner could decide which of these search indexes will get to list your site results. This way you could get off the standard google results pages and concentrate your results through an affiliate search portal or negotiate with other search portals for the right to list your website. Would allow non-mainstream stuff to really find their audience and vice versa.
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I took a look at Rollyo.com when it first came out, and it has a nice early Web 2.0 feel about it, but it was limited to just 25 sites in a 'Searchroll'. I can see that being useful in some cases, but for me it was way too restrictive.
5 88935%3Ahixzfwm7k6y ) in about a total of 5 minutes. Sure I need to make the page look pretty, etc... but WOW it was easy, and the result set looks exactly what you'd expect from Google.
I've just created a really quick and dirty Google custom search with 249 Toronto Photoblogs (shamless plug http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=006509349612823
I couldn't find the maximum # of sites that Google will let you include, and the maximum # to exclude... Anyone find the limits?
It would be nice to be able to use this kind of customizability for desktop search.
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Competition does results in more 'innovation' from everyone.
Google made MS 'innovate', MS made Google 'innovate'.
I can see the value of a social site like digg, delicious, or slashdot providing the list of pages for a personalized search from domains of popular past stories (or bookmark submissions) automatically. Filter out the noise of the internet automatically by only searching only your favorite pages and optionally add the pages of 1000's of like minded individuals your site attracts. Then Google gets a whole new set of data about the popularity of sites to take and put back into their main index. Social story submission, social bookmarking, and now social search.
... and it's all Googly. That is to say, the implementation is quick, but a little too Googly, in terms of weaving the results into your own web site. Of course you can limit the search scope to your own site, and the results are right there (and of course very fast)... but interestingly, though I regularly see Google crawling my dynamicly rendered content, very obvious searches that should bring that stuff back aren't showing up in the results. It's the same problem content people always have in getting search engines to like everything on their sites.
In other words, it's very easy to graft this tool onto your web site, but you may have a lot of more advanced websmithery ahead of you to actually get Google to successfully index everything on your site. And, of course, it's not going to help people find some document you just put up this morning... Google's indexes can be off by days at least, and often weeks.
A well-crafted built-in search tool, and good keywording habits by the people producing the content are more likely to get your own visitors finding material on your own web site. But if you open up the Google engine's scope to include other web sites, they'll get a lot more info to pick from... if you don't mind those eyeballs wandering off, never to be seen again.
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I attempted to create one specific to Slashdot comments. I don't like Slashdot's built in search for anything but articles. Unfortunately slashdot blocks the indexing of pages at /comments.pl (probably to prevent duplicate content, thereby helping their SEO). But it does work well for my site documenting the best Slashdot comments. So please give it a try and let me know what you think. What I'd really like to know is if it's worth adding slashdot's article URLs even though it'll then search the summary's text as well. Also if there are any other sites which should be included.
I tried the site integration code but the search form submission seems to conflict with my CMS. So a custom page outside the execution of a CMS may be required for some sites.
Developers: We can use your help.
So you mean if I have some old domain lying around that I've never used, I could create a custom google search engine in under an hour and put that domain to work?
:-)
Wait, I guess I can
slashsearch.org - slashdot search. powered by google.
Google will be able to harness people's specific expertise to fine tune google's domain specific search, without signing any contract with anybody. That means less administrative and financial commitment, less legal headache, and less legal fees. And because of the adsense program, Google only pay, when Google got payed.
Brilliant, fucking brilliant!
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Here is a sample installation. Use the search box at the top.
[alk]
The Terms of Service are terrible. Section 1.5 says that Google is your exclusive search service. No offering Google and Windows Live to your users. Maybe no providing your own htdig service. It's Google or nothing. Of course, section 1.2 is the ever popular, "we can change this at any time without notifying you, and if you keep using the service you agree to the new terms without even knowing they exist." Of course, these are basically the same terms that Google Free offered. It's really frustrating; I'd like to use Google Search to give visitors to my job's web site a better search engine, but those terms aren't reasonable for a business.
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http://www.htdig.org/, no google ads either, custom search pages can be designed indexes updated etc. no google widgets here required.
I belong to a few forums that require member registration to browse. As a result, you can't use google normally to search the forum. Can this be used or would it make the information be publicly available?
-- Boycott Shell
I would love to see a "desktop" version of this - i.e. something that can work inside a browser with a plugin or something. In fact, it could probably be done with Greasemonkey...
Imagine being able to type in "NEC 40xx review" and have all the pointless price comparison and fake review sites filters from your results automatically.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
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I believe Yahoo! has had something like this for awhile: http://builder.search.yahoo.com/
Nothing creative here. Take the existing google adswords/adsense programs, and use the existing google infrastructure to do searches over sites that google is already indexing. The question is, what took them so long to do something so obvious? Rollyo, yahoo, and microsoft live already do this - but without google's affiliate program. This should have been done a year ago.
site:domain1 OR site:domain2 etc.
You can craft the search, and then put it in your own html:
Only Quotes is a search engine that searches a ton of quotation sites. It's fast -- much faster than any of the 20 or so websites it searches -- and it doesn't return any spam links or links to quotation sites that are slow or low quality.
I think the custom search engine program has a lot of potential for domains that have a relatively small number of high-quality sites, and for which the normal google search is too contaminated with seo-ified crap and commercial junk (which is unfortunately more and more the case for just about everything). I guess google will probably use the data from the custom search engines to determine high-quality sites for given domains of knowledge. But then how long will it be before the spammers and seo types start creating custom search engines that search only their spam sites?