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Google Custom Search

Kevin [PersonRank 0]

Tuesday, October 24, 2006
17 years ago17,875 views

Here it is:
http://www.google.com/coop/cse/

DPic [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

This is great!

Kevin [PersonRank 0]

17 years ago #

Here's a custom search engine for Google.

Everyone is welcome to edit the search engine to make it more relevant.

http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=008421036714351442366%3Af8jt61pjaek

Kevin [PersonRank 0]

17 years ago #

Here's the press release. They are really excited about this:

http://www.google.com/press/annc/custom_search.html

And some partners have CSE alreay, including MacWorld and Intuit:

http://google.com/coop/cse/examples/

pokemo [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Great....can make money from Google Adsense as well....:)

pokemo [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

it is unable to search for a specific domain for example *.*.de

David Hetfield [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

great..
thanks man!

Andrew Hitchcock [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Here's mine:

http://google.com/coop/cse?cx=012209517088559882238%3Agthoahad-m8

If any of you want to help me create a webmaster search engine, just leave a message or e-mail me at: adpowers[put at-character here]gmail.com

Gary Price [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Both News.com and Search Engine Watch have stories.
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/061023-220205
http://news.com.com/Google+releases+customizable+search/2100-1038_3-6128807.html?tag=alert

A few other comments:
+ This is really a new variation of Google Coop as pointed out on SEW.

+ Not a big surprise since in the past few weeks both Yahoo and MS Live Search have released similar services.

+ Rollyo has offered a highly lauded service that allows users to create specialty databases for about a year.

+ Rollyo offers a great feature where (if logged in, you do not need an account to create a "Searchroll") direct from your bookmarks. Useful.

+ SEW's Greg Sterling also compares some of Google's new service to Eurekster's Swicki tool. He also says that Google Coop confused many users. He refers to Rollyo as an "industrial strength" tool.

+ Results can combine both web results with your list of selected domains, your domains get higher rankings or just your domains.

+ Your results can include all web results but emphasize the domains you list or just the list of specific sites.

+ The creator determines who can contribute more urls. Either ANY other Google user (watch out for spam or lots of time editing out unrelated urls) or a specific list of subscribers.

3) Search engine builders must list at least one keyword that:

"is used to make sure we promote the most relevant pages in the search results for your search engine."

Reminds me of in concept (the sliders) used to give certain concepts a higher ranking in the first version of Google Personalized back in 2004.

:-) From a business standpoint this release comes just a couple of weeks after Sergey Brin was quoted saying:

"We don’t want people to have to learn about 20 different products that work in 20 different ways,” Brin said. “I was even getting lost.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-google6oct06,1,1629177.story?ctrack=1&cset=true

http://money.aol.com/news/articles/_a/google-continues-to-plumb-new/n20061005213209990014

The LA Times article is also the one that discusses how Google execs want to "put a lid on new products."

Granted this release was likely in the pipeline before then.

Tony Ruscoe [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Neat. It would be even cooler if we had this middle option:

--------------------------------------------------

How to search included sites:

   o Search the entire web but emphasize included sites.
   o Search the entire web but *exclude* the listed sites.
   o Search only included sites.

--------------------------------------------------

This way, you would be able to filter spam and crap sites from your search results...

Tony Ruscoe [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Actually, you can scrap that last comment – I've just seen that you can actually do this once you've created your Custom Search Engine. (It's under Control Panel > Sites > Excluded sites.)

I guess, as usual, they've thought of everything... ;-)

Tony Ruscoe [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Now, if they had an API for this, it would possibly be perfect. (Although I doubt they'd offer that solution, as they wouldn't be able to serve ads...)

Art-One [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Here's mine:
http://google.com/coop/cse?cx=001404921478984617399%3A18dyebbnzue

Tony: I thought there was an API. I'l look if I can find back the information.

Art-One [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Well the API they are refering at is the Ajax Search API. So you can further control the results. But I think that you want an API to control your SE settings, right?

Mambo [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

There are two main search apis: Google's Web API, and AJAX Search API.

This is pretty cool. We're now starting to see "features, not products", with Google Co-op become more of a collection of Google resources for web contributors. Not just one product.

pokemo [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Here is mine:
http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=005600592367782909842%3Azz8di61n17a

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

> If any of you want to help me create a webmaster
> search engine, just leave a message or e-mail me at:
> adpowers[put at-character here]gmail.com

I think you can just leave it open for contributors to have people join, you can then still approve every single one (if I understand this right).

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Tony, they do support the AJAX Search API to hook up with this service... but I guess you mean something different...

Tony Ruscoe [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Yeah, I would like to see a server-side API like their web search SOAP API so that you don't have to rely on JavaScript or IFRAMEs.

/pd [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

"Google search results customized by Search News Search using Google Co-op"
  
But when I actually feed a term in the results are not customized at all, its not returning results from the "searches 11 sites, including.."

   Is this only me ?
  
  
  

Tony Ruscoe [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

/pd – I think you're right... enter [test] in the "Search News Search" engine and you'll get all the usual results.

I think it might depend on the option selected here:

--------------------------------------------------

How to search included sites:

   o Search the entire web but emphasize included sites.
   o Search only included sites.

--------------------------------------------------

Perhaps Philipp selected the 1st option...?

/pd [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Ok, has anyone tagged their adsense account to their CSE ?

theres some kewl samples here

http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearch/samples.html

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Yes, I selected the first "fuzzy" option because I think it's more interesting for everyone to test-drive how that works...

> Ok, has anyone tagged their adsense account to their CSE ?

It didn't work here. I entered my phone number etc. then I got a verification link sent to me, and after clicking it and clicking submit, I got a (silly) error.

<<Grant Account Access Failed

Sorry, we weren't able to verify your information. Please check that the URL in your web browser exactly matches the URL in your confirmation email. Also, please verify that you've enabled cookies and JavaScript on your browser. _How do I enable cookies and JavaScript?_

If you have any questions or concerns, please email us at adsense-support[put at-character here]google.com.>>

Obli [PersonRank 1]

17 years ago #

Finally a way to combine ac.uk and .edu!

marc [PersonRank 0]

17 years ago #

now for cse's including less than 10 sites to search e.g. the availability of wildcards *searchterm* would be cool.
in this case wildcards should not cause overload to googles infrastructure?

or are there any other reasons or problems that no wildcards are allowed?

Obli [PersonRank 1]

17 years ago #

bah, it didn't work...

pokemo [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Philipp,

I get this message as well....but after i try a couple of times...it works...:)
try to close the brower and click on the link from your gmail account and submit again....hope this help...:)

pokemo [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

if successful...you will get this
Account Access Granted
You have already granted the website www.google.com/coop access to your account.
If you have any questions or concerns, please email us at adsense-support[put at-character here]google.com.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

So, as I am *forced* to use at least 1 keyword, I can't easily create a search engine searching for all sites I made. However, I ended up adding a dummy keyword like "oiewoiwe9232309welwe9023" and that got the form submitted fine... and it doesn't seem to hurt the results quality.

Tony Ruscoe [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

<< now for cse's including less than 10 sites to search e.g. the availability of wildcards *searchterm* would be cool. >>

I think that might be the case actually...

Searching for [*] or [* *] on my custom search engine (where I'm restricting my searches to the sites I've added) works fine. However, this doesn't work on Philipp's custom search engine (where he's searching the entire web).

(BTW, I think it's a little annoying that they don't tell you how many results have been returned in total...)

Obli [PersonRank 1]

17 years ago #

I'm betting the keywords are just for data mining.

On a related note, where can I find a huge list of every major US and UK university domain? I've figured I'd have to build a uni domain search engine the hard way...

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Obli – a general tip for finding specific lists: get half a dozen or a dozen random list items you need, and then Google-search for all of them at once. This might bring you to pages listing all items.

Example: you want to know all domains I created. Well, you know only 3 – outer-court.com, coverbrowser.com, and sketchswap.com. But search for [outer-court. coverbrowser sketchswap] in Google and you'll find the list of all of them.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=outer-court+coverbrowser+sketchswap&btnG=Google+Search

Same works with most celebrities, product names, categories, words to find dictionaries, etc. You might wanna include words that are at the opposite ends of the alphabet to get bigger lists, though you should know that SEs often only index the first N kilobytes of a given HTML page...

Tony Ruscoe [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Obli, you could start by scraping these searches:

   [ http://www.google.com/search?q=site:.ac.uk]
   [ http://www.google.com/search?q=site:.edu]

Other than that, I don't think there's a definitive list anywhere.

It sucks that you can't use wildcards when specifying domains like you can with the URL patterns!

/pd [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

List of US Universities...

http://www.utexas.edu/world/univ/state/

bujai [PersonRank 1]

17 years ago #

Google co op have different result in indifferent area 。In some area ,it totally doesnt work。

/pd [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

and now the UK uni's

http://www.scit.wlv.ac.uk/ukinfo/alpha.html

pokemo [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

hope they can allow us to use wildcards...otherwise my ThreadsSearch turns out to be an impossible task...
http://blogoscoped.com/forum/72899.html

Obli [PersonRank 1]

17 years ago #

Thanks, but I needed a raw list of them lined up, with Philipp's tips and some find/replace in notepad it wasn't too hard.

Here it is, the US & UK uni search engine: http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=016442597058023641471%3Ahtiqwuikl9y

FofR [PersonRank 2]

17 years ago #

I am making a WIKI only search engine, for finding facts fast.

At the moment the sites are:
en.wikipedia.org, www.answers.com, www.tviv.info, wiki.trivialbeing.net

I will be adding more soon and the engine is open to volunteer additions.

http://google.com/coop/cse?cx=006775555251158006122%3Anxp0gaipa40

Abhishek Goyal [PersonRank 1]

17 years ago #

Well thats a start ... i wish they could let me auto sync my engine with my feeds in their rss reader. I often want to retrieve a entry from my feeds.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Abhishek, actually you can export your Google Reader subscriptions as OPML file, which you can then import into CSE... so says Matt Cutts:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/review-custom-search-engine/

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Gee those CSE homepage URLs sure could look nicer...

Andrew Hitchcock [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Hi Philipp,

I changed mine to volunteer mode after reading Matt Cutt's blog where I got the impression that you have to approve volunteers. Still none, though :(

Martin [PersonRank 0]

17 years ago #

The "include only from these domains" option does not work for me at all. I have the confirmation "searches 1 site: ...", but the results are from all over the web.

Hashim [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Here's mine: http://google.com/coop/cse?cx=011091861294247556995%3Avxh40zuj7q4

It's a reference search that goes through Wikipedia, Encarta, Answers.com, Squidoo, etc.

I wonder if we are allowed to buy Adsense ads to promote our custom search engines.

Matt Cutts [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Obli, I love the idea of uni search. :)

Andrew, don't take my word for it on volunteers; I didn't get a chance to play with that in pre-release mode, so I don't know how getting volunteers approved works..

/pd [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

thats interesting question Hashim.. will they allow ad to promote a custom's built engine.. ?

Ionut Alex. Chitu [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

You can host the search engine in your site.

/pd [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Ionut, hostin ok..but are you allowed to market your CES via adwords/Adsense ?? that is buy ads which points back to your CES which is also riddled with adsense :)-

Ionut Alex. Chitu [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

So what? Buy ads that point to your site that has a search box (for the CSE), content and maybe some ads.

It would be a bad idea to place ads for "michael jordan" and link to a SERP for "michael jordan" at your customized Basketball search engine.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

> It would be a bad idea to place ads for "michael jordan" and
> link to a SERP for "michael jordan" at your customized
> Basketball search engine.

... also, it may be illegal according to the AdWords guidelines.

<<In general, build pages that provide substantial and useful information to the end-user. If your ad does link to a page consisting of mostly ads or general search results (such as a directory or catalog page), provide additional information beyond what the user may have seen in your ad or on the page prior to clicking on your ad.>>
https://adwords.google.com/select/siteguidelines.html

/pd [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

ahhhhhh..thanks for the pointer Philipp!!

Andrew Hitchcock [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Matt, I got my first volunteer and you do have to approve them. It would be nice if there were some built-in way to communicate with your fellow CSE creators.

Joseph Hunkins [PersonRank 0]

17 years ago #

Very impressive. I'm still not clear how much "boosting" is done because some of my state search travel results seem to favor inferior sites ahead of those listed, but this really looks like another fantastic Google solution.

Martin [PersonRank 0]

17 years ago #

Wow, now that is strange. My custom search works in FIrefox, whereas in Opera, it ignores that it should only include a specific website. AARGH!

[testing stuff]

OK, I got it. Opera uses a German locale, and the search URL has hl=de. I use Firefox in the English version, and it sends hl=en.

So the custom search only works for users that have English configured as their primary language it seams. I hope this is just a bug.

Tony Ruscoe [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Perhaps it's not a bug; perhaps it's behaviour by (poor) design:

<< 7. When will the Custom Search Engine be available in other countries?
You can use http://www.google.com/coop/cse/ to build a Custom Search Engine for all English language Google domains, including Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. We hope to extend the service to additional countries and languages as soon as we can. >>

From: http://www.google.com/coop/docs/cse/faq.html

However, I would have excepted them to just return the custom results in English regardless of what the "hl=" parameter is configured to be. Maybe that's not the case...

Martin [PersonRank 0]

17 years ago #

This is stupid, because the hl parameter is set depending on the users browser setting.

If I go to http://www.fao.org/ and search for "rice" (example courtesy of Google), I get results about "Condoleezza Rice", "Anna Rice" or "Rice University" when my browser language is German, and proper results about rice on foa.org pages only, when my browser language is English.

Also, the point 7 speaks about Google domains, not the origin of the user or visitor.

How does one contact the CSE guys anyway? There was some form on google.com, but I can't find it anymore :-(Google makes a great effort to hide it.

Grimmthething [PersonRank 2]

17 years ago #

There is a ton of things that they could do to give us more control over our results. However, at the moment I am pretty impressed.

This is the start of my free site search:
http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=001491000379620846559%3A29va63h8fuy

Kirby Witmer [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Hmm.. it looks like Google is promoting the custom search engine on the homepage of google.com.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Do you have a screenshot Kirby? Can't see it...

Jake's View [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Pokemo, this may have been mentioned already, but your link to your search engine is broken.

pokemo [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Jake, here is my link
http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=005600592367782909842:ewgsx8qeblg

Grimmthething [PersonRank 2]

17 years ago #

I have started a page to compile some of these searches, it might help reduce redundancy:

http://www.grimmthething.com/other/cse.htm

Ricardo [PersonRank 0]

17 years ago #

Here's mine:

http://www.metodosdebusca.com/buscopium/

DPic [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

I'm getting a new problem – whenever I click "Volunteer to contribute to this search engine." it's now asking me to log in and every time I log in it just refreshes the page.

Rob [PersonRank 0]

17 years ago #

Here are a couple more places that are compiling collections of these search engines

http://www.customsearchguide.com/
http://www.lurpo.com/

djfreshmoney [PersonRank 0]

17 years ago #

I was disappointed that there didn't seem to be a way to create a custom image search. Search for images from a list of sites... Did I miss something?

Eric Enge [PersonRank 1]

17 years ago #

I think the whole thing is great. This is what led us to publish http://www.customsearchguide.com (mentioned by Rob above). I think the success of the whole initiative rides on whether or not users will begin to value the improved search experience enough to begin looking for it.

Vertical search is a great sounding idea. We all have seen places where seardh results are flawed.

There are some problems that are not easily solved by algorithms. For example, when a user searches on "diabetes", the search engine does not know if they are a patient looking for treatment, or a doctor looking for research information. Yet you can build vertical search engines that are tailored to one audience or the other.

The promise is there. Will the users come looking for it?

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Eric, I'm getting an error on your site:

<<Software error:

Can't use an undefined value as a HASH reference at /usr/www/users/csguide/ [snip] line 69.

For help, please send mail to the webmaster (csguide[put at-character here]pair.com), giving this error message and the time and date of the error. >>

Stephen Tordoff [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Creating a new CSE, and then deleting the all included sites results in:

Last updated: Dec 31 1969

http://img261.imageshack.us/img261/4382/gge0.png

pokemo [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Currently...i am unable to add sites to my cse...Are you having the same problem? thanks

Ed Schmidt [PersonRank 0]

17 years ago #

I'm hosting the results on my own site. It'll give you more control over the look .

Here's a sample:

http://www.lures.info/googlecoop/results.html?as_occt=title&cx=009466590676640199738%3A7tbiatdbtgo&q=spinnerbaits&sa=+Bass+Fishing+Search+&cof=GIMP%3Asilver%3BT%3Ablack%3BBIMG%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.lures.info%2Fimages%2Flogo_white333.gif%3BALC%3Acc0000%3BL%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.lures.info%2Fimages%2Flogo_ud2.gif%3BGFNT%3A666666%3BLC%3A004A95%3BBGC%3AF6F6F6%3BAH%3Acenter%3BVLC%3A666666%3BGL%3A1%3BGALT%3A009900%3BFORID%3A10%3B&hq=bass+OR+%7Efishing+OR+%7Elures+OR+%7Etackle+OR+%7Ebait+OR+%7Efish+OR+bass+fishing+OR+largemouth+OR+smallmouth+OR+%7Eboats+OR+%7Epro+OR+tips+OR+tactics+OR+spotted+OR+%7Ereports+OR+%7Eriver+OR+lake+OR+%7Ewater+OR+%7Enews+OR+%7Eguide+-guitar+-drum+-artist+-Aquarium&sitesearch=

1greenthumb [PersonRank 0]

17 years ago #

Here is a link to mine.... Feel free to sign up if you wish. Thanks

http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=010157069581206268477%3A2bf0spfjdpc

Roger Browne [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

I've done a search engine for the Eiffel Programming Language:
http://eiffelzone.com/search.html

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