Amazing tutorial! But crikey! So much work . . .

Well, a lot of work to set things up certainly. Once you get through the initial phase, nor really so bad. And I wouldn't be surprised to see more tools to support this sort of thing, to make it more accessible.

But you know the *real* work in all this is all the annotation to make your CSE REALLY good. Sure, you can load it up with a bunch of domains to search, trying to get the best of 'em, and screen out the worst and the spam. But I think to really make a kick-ass CSE, you're going to want to find the best resources (often hand picking the best articles) and promote them. Otherwise, alot is still left to the user to find stuff.

So once again, it all comes back to tagging. Will people really bother? Clearly Google is onto something with the collaboration features, hoping to make the whole effort a team/social thing. We'll see.

Microsoft had this first several months ago at their new search engine at search.live.com/macros. They have a pretty easy to follow UI. If you think this is difficult, check that out.

Hi, I've created several handy custom searchenignes

Live WebCam Search
http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=014863114814409449623%3Ak-upuqk_m6m

Audio File Search
http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=014863114814409449623%3Ajc-vjhl_c5g

.Torrent Search
http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=014863114814409449623%3Aulqlvbu5oky

Can come in handy...

Have fun with it.

Hi John And Eric

We just wanted to say thanks for the beautifully written tutorial above, this is the level of detail and understanding that will put CSEs into the hands of those thousands of webmasters who are genuine experts in their own niches but who may not be totally web savvy, an important bunch of people!

Full disclosure, we run www.cselinks.com/ and obviously have an interest in listing CSEs as they develop. Your articles can only help to accelerate the production of quality CSEs.

John and Paul,

Thanks for the positive feedback – it's very much appreciated!

I'm glad you found the tutorial useful, and hope you're right that it can accelerate the use of CSEs. We're obviously "early days" in the whole vertical search engine space, but I think this technology shows great promise at addressing some of the problems with horizontal search. We're having a lot of fun figuring it out.

Excellent article. I intend to use this information to improve on my cse on NCAA Division II Football. Will you be covering other topics in future articles e.g <Facet> ?

http://buffalobird.googlepages.com/ncaa2football.html

Buffalo Bird,

We are planning some more articles like this one, and are discussing these with Philipp and Tony. We will let you know.

I was a bit confused with the article...do we do both, the annotations and the the other step or just one or the other???

Junior,

You need to define the context file to create the label with the "boost" property, and you need to create the annotation file to assign the boost label to the URLs that you want to boost.

Hope that helps. Ask again if that doesn't clear it up.

Guys,

Good article. Very easy to follow and understand: of course, I had read through the documentation (inc. the advanced stuff) and setup a couple of CSEs already. However, I just finally understood how to use the 'BOOST' labels. Thanks.

But I need your expert advice: I am trying to upload annotations "on the fly" from my asp.net app directly to the google address specified in the 'action' tag in the Upload form on the Advanced page. I tested my app and I can send the configured request to a remote server under my control: I receive a response 'OK' and I have verified that the request received is what was sent. When I do the exact same thing and post to the google address I get a "bad request(400)" error. Any suggestions?

Thanks again. (You can email me at johnBSNdigital.com).

Hi John

Just got back to read your comment "We're having a lot of fun figuring it out" Fun hmmm! I am I the only one who sometimes finds himself almost bewildered by whether I am on on my CSE, my Coop, my Gadget or my Customized home page! One minute I thing I have got it the next I think I am stuck in a circular Google induced whirl! God help the general public!

It is fun though, we are getting some really good CSEs submitted and also finding tweaks and variations in the basic model that we would never have thought of. It is worth looking at every submission even if the topic isn't immediately interesting because the methodology may be.

We are working on a couple of articles on adding CSE's to Google Customizable Home Pages to get more CSE users as well as creators, hope to publish this week or next.

Regards

John

www.cselinks.com

John Mencias,

Interesting question. I haven't really looked at this, but I have a possible suggestion: look at the Google Marker bookmarklet. I'm not sure what kind of interface it uses, but I would think it's more amenable to one-at-a-time additions to annotations. You may be able to reverse engineer something from that.

I'm curious what you're working on... some kind of tool? I've also got a tool that could use this feature, so perhaps this is a problem we could cooperate on a bit. I'll send you an e-mail off-board.

Cheers,
John

Hi John @ CSELinks,

Yeah, one man's pain... ;-)

I admit the fun for me is slightly perverse... this stuff is new and not really well understood, so there's always some neat new thing to figure out, and of course I always enjoy a soapbox, so once figured out, it's fun to explain it.

Keep up the good work!

john

Hi John & John,

Thanks for attending to my request and for your assistance. I posted this very problem (twice since yesterday) in the 'Google Co-op' Groups and it hasn't even been posted up as yet. I am not sure what's the reason for the extended delay. In any case, I will discuss with you further (via email) what I am working on. I have no problem sharing with you whatever knowledge I can. In the meantime, I will take a look at the Google Marker stuff: at this point I have no clue what it is.

Take care,

John Mencias

Hi

Thank you for this tutorial, I can't wait to digest it some more to get the very best out of my own CSE.

I do have some attempts at websites on the burner, so I'm looking forward to implementing the CSE on them.

I was wondering about the keywords though. I chose Internet Marketing as a topic – Not original and not meant to be, but I thought it might be a help to me if I can understand how it works, to find exactly what I want & when I need it. The point I wanted to ask is how many keywords, or as in your example will only one do ?

This is my CSE

http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=011125539943917907424%3A0wlmjgypg1y

Apart from the keyword question, can I do any more ?

Thank you again.

Brian

Hey Guys,

You can take a look at how I implemented custom CSEs into our site at BELIZEhomepage.com. The site uses more than one CSE. I was trying to register it with cselinks.com but was getting an error when I clicked on the Register link. I still have not gotten time to get back to tackling uploading annotations on the fly: but will soon :).

Our site will be launched fully by next week Monday.

John Mencias

Brian,

Sorry to be so long getting back to you. Do you still have a question about this? I took a look at your site and it looks pretty neat. Generally, my belief is that you want only a few very relevant keywords. Google hasn't revealed a lot about how keywords work in CSEs, but my sense is that too many will tend to restrict your results. Hope that helps.

John M,

Good luck with this. Keep in touch regarding your batch upload strategy.

Regards,
John