/Tools/ Create a custom search engine

31/10/2007 | Filed under Develop > Tools

Rob Buckley shows you how to make your sitey the sharpest search engine of them all using Google’s Co-op technology. The secret behind it? Refinement and customisation

When you think of searching, more often than not, you think of Google. It has even become a verb, despite the best attempts of its legal department to prevent it – have you ‘Googled’ someone today? But it has become much more than just a web search engine. Because you can now embed it into your website, it’s also an easy way to add a search facility to your pages.

The ability to use Google as a site search engine has been around for a while now, and is reasonably common. As long as Google can access all the pages on your site and it updates its indexes as often as you update your pages, it’s a great, hassle-free and cheap tool to make your site’s content available to visitors, whether you’re using static pages or a Content Management System.

But recently, Google created a new version of its “embeddable” search engine. As well as being customisable so that it matches your site’s look and feel, Google’s Co-op custom search engine can be set to search a list of sites as well as your own, or it can search the whole web. You can also preload it with search terms so that it favours particular kinds of searches. If your site is about karate, for example, and someone searches for “belt”, the results of the search can favour karate belts, rather than those available from Marks & Spencer.

About the author:

Name: Rob Buckley
Site: www.the-word-is-not-enough.com
Areas of expertise: XHTML, PHP and MySQL
If I were a kitchen implement… I’d definitely be a whisk

Click here to download tutorial PDF

 

Comments

Mak / 31/10/2007 / 21:00 / http://gallery.k-netsystems.net

Great tutorial. Thank you.

I just put this custom search engine to my blog site. I use the new overlay version(AJAX Search API ), it's simple and looks cool however its not possible to make money.

Kris / 01/11/2007 / 10:41

That was a bit of a short one... Hmmm.

Ward / 03/11/2007 / 16:35

I run a bunch of commercial websites and would love to integrate Google custom search but it's beyond me how Google thinks I am going to start showing ads for my competitors. With other free solutions out there I am not going to go for a Google enterprise solution. There needs to be a middle road that addresses this problem. Maybe I just use an api and grab and format my own results... Thats probably the easiest. One some one puts a step by step to this solution on the web we are going to see a lot of traffic down this road.

W

gabs / 06/11/2007 / 16:52 / http://www.seohome.co.uk

google coop launched well over a year ago...

@kris its intergrates into your adsese account of which you can make $$

@ward.. You can block advertisers e.g. competitors via adsense..

google-black / 10/11/2007 / 09:28 / http://google-black.blogspot.com/

Here's a custom search engine with a black theme as opposed to google's all white theme.
http://google-black.blogspot.com/

olly / 02/06/2008 / 09:58

great the google website talks you through this process really quickly - but does anyone know how to hack the google search to remove the logo and the hyperlink that says create your own search.

could do most using iframe bu not the hyperlink

<iframe src="http://gmodules.com/ig/ifr?url=http://www.google.com/........&amp;";
synd=open&amp;
width=320&amp;
height=100&amp;
title=&amp;
output=js frameborder=0 scrolling=no></iframe>

ruby / 17/07/2008 / 13:37

Hi,

Does anyone know how you change the appearance of the search box and button. I know you can do it in the google interface but it does not give you the option to add your own button, change the size of the search box and so on.

The Bit Bot / 17/05/2009 / 03:16 / http://www.thebitbot.com

I have been working on a Google Custom Search engine which I think is pretty turning out pretty good. I have been tuning it to eliminate obvious spam in the results. So far I am very happy with it and use it myself.

http://www.thebitbot.com

Cheers!

kanedogg / 22/05/2009 / 13:23 / http://www.digitalkreations.info

Tutorial is ok, built for beginners though .....for those asking the questions about how to customize the results and remove google logo its rather easy if you develop the entire search page from the google ajax search api.
Not the pre-build custom search control as this is done. Its not for beginners just so you know....

By using the api you just return the results to your page and can style it all as you wish. its the old school way, you know how we used to DEVELOP our pages ! LOL

maybe i'll write a tut someday and show you all how =o)

but for now i suggest those wanting a total custom search checkout the ajax api's and methods there
cheers

prashanth10 / 11/07/2010 / 12:43 / http://yahooomail.com/prashanth_12@rocketmail.com

DO GOOD TO GOOD

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