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."

Comments

Will create a lot more spam sites?

[Salvance]

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.).

Re:Will create a lot more spam sites?

[crazyjeremy]

This would make it easy to see all the sites that the spammer is affiliated with. Then you could simply filter out most of the domains in his search umbrella.

Great for reviews

[EvilMonkeySlayer]

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.

experts-exchange.com

[jrmiller84]

Maybe now I can finally make it to stop showing me results from experts-exchange.com when I'm looking for tutorials!

Attempt for Slashdot comments

[truthsearch]

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.

Sample

[loconet]

Here is a sample installation. Use the search box at the top.

Terrible Terms of Service

[ChaosDiscord]

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.

Will it search members-only forums?

[objekt]

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?

Yahoo!

[Spuddy42]

I believe Yahoo! has had something like this for awhile: http://builder.search.yahoo.com/