Programmable Search Engine Blog

Announcing the Programmable Search Element Paid API

Thursday, November 19, 2020

The Programmable Search Element offers a straightforward way to add Programmable Search to your website. Until now, the only version of the Search Element available to most customers has been the free ads-supported version. Today we’re happy to announce a new ads-free configuration of the Search Element using the Programmable Search Element Paid API. By enabling this API and linking it to your search engine, you can opt to pay on a per-query basis ($5 per 1000 queries) instead of showing ads. No code changes on your website are necessary to switch from a free ads-supported Search Element to the paid ads-free version. You can switch back to the free ads-supported version of the Search Element at any time. Setting a Paid Element key in the Control Panel:

Search Element results, ads-free:

Click here to learn more and get started with the Programmable Search Element Paid API.Note that this does not affect the existing Custom Search JSON API, which continues to offer a programmatic ads-free way to access search results without using the Search Element. Click here to see a comparison of all Programmable Search offerings.

Announcing the Programmable Search Attribution API

Tuesday, October 13, 2020

Search Results that are created using Programmable Search Engine may display “Enhanced by Google”. If the Search Box and Search Results are rendered through the Programmable Search Engine Search Element, then this will happen automatically. Today, we're happy to announce that users using their own search box or the Custom Search JSON API may add this attribution using the new Programmable Search Attribution API. Simply include a single tag:<script src="https://www.gstatic.com/prose/brand.js" targetId="divId"></script>
Everyone using Google branding in their own search box should use this new resource. For more information see the help pages on Attribution API and Branding Guidelines.

Multiple Owners now available in Programmable Search Engine

Tuesday, September 29, 2020

Many of you have requested a process to allow multiple users to own a Programmable Search Engine. For instance, you may have created, developed and customized your website's search experience under your Google account, but want the long-term management of the search engine to be performed by someone else. Now, you can easily add a new owner to your search engine by simply selecting the Owner User Role when you add a user in the Users tab in the control panel.

After the user accepts your invitation, they become a full owner of the engine and can perform operations like configuring Ads or adding other owners. If you want more limited powers for a user, you can add them as an Administrator instead.

We hope this process makes it easier to manage your search engines. For more details, please refer to the articles on Choose who can edit your search engine, and User Accounts in the help center.

As always, we appreciate your feedback in the Support Forum.

More monitoring options for the Custom Search JSON API

Wednesday, August 12, 2020

The Custom Search JSON API lets you develop websites and applications to retrieve and display search results from Programmable Search Engine (formerly Google Custom Search) programmatically. Basic monitoring for the API has been available through Cloud Platform Console's API Dashboard. Today, we’re excited to announce that the Custom Search JSON API is now integrated with Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver). Google Cloud's operations suite supports a wide variety of metrics, which you can combine with filters and aggregations for new and insightful views into your application performance. For example, you can combine a request count metric with a grouping on the HTTP Response Code to build a dashboard that shows error rates over time, or aggregate a latency metric at varying percentiles. Learn more about creating custom dashboards, setting up alerts, and accessing metrics data programmatically.Example of a custom dashboard showing QPS and error rates:

Custom dashboard showing latency percentiles:

Defining an alert on a QPS threshold:

See Monitoring Your API Usage for a discussion of the different monitoring and alerting capabilities provided by the API Dashboard and the Google Cloud Operations suite.

Improving our Image Search design

Friday, June 5, 2020

We are very excited to bring a new look and feel to our Image Search results for the Programmable Search Element. The new design makes it easier to navigate, peruse, and view image previews.Simply enable image search to start using it today.

Desktop

Before	After

Mobile

Before	After

As always, we welcome your feedback in our forums.

Custom Search Engine is now Programmable Search Engine

Thursday, April 30, 2020

Over the past year, we have made a series of improvements to Custom Search Engine to make it ever more powerful and more flexible. Our launch of Callbacks made it possible to customize the rendering of search results beyond what is possible through our standard controls in the Custom Search Engine control panel. The Knowledge Graph launch made it easy to tap into the power of Google’s understanding of the semantic web to build search experiences based on topics and concepts.

Looking forward, our exciting roadmap will continue to focus on making public web content programmatically accessible and your search engines more flexible. As our product has evolved, we believe our branding should as well. We are excited to announce that Custom Search Engine will now be called Programmable Search Engine.

Over the next several months, you’ll start to see this branding change reflected throughout the entire user experience.

We invite you to learn more about Programmable Search Engine and to get started.

Bringing the Power of Knowledge Graph to Custom Search

Wednesday, July 10, 2019

We're happy to announce that Custom Search Engine (CSE) owners can now use Knowledge Graph entities to configure their CSE. The Knowledge Graph (KG) is used by Google Search to help users discover information more quickly and easily, and contains millions of entries that describe real-world entities like people, places, and things.

CSE owners can use KG Entities to

Define which pages the CSE searches
Create Refinements to narrow down search results within a CSE.

For more information about using Knowledge Graph Entities to define and refine your Custom Search Engine, visit our developer documentation.

Here are some examples of what you can do:

Searching the entire web for specific Entities

CSE's KG Entity support makes it easy to search the entire web for pages (or images) about specific topics.
We've configured this CSE to search the entire web for pages about Alphabet companies, using the CSE control panel as shown below:

Try out the CSE here: https://cse.google.com/cse?cx=000888210889775888983:b2bhygxt4le

Searching specific pages for Entities

Instead of searching the entire web, you can combine KG entities with CSE's existing site search functionality.
For example, we've configured this CSE to search Wikipedia for pages about the entity Pittsburgh:

Try out the CSE here: https://cse.google.com/cse?cx=000888210889775888983:x1jaj-jlc3e

Defining Refinements with Entities

CSE's refinements feature allows users to drill down into their search results. Now, CSE owners can use KG entities to define the refinements if their CSE.

For example, we defined this CSE to be about the Knowledge Graph Entity "basketball":

Then we add refinements for basketball subtopics, like the NBA, WNBA, College, Olympic basketball, and basketball gear. For example, this refinement returns pages that are about both Basketball (from the top-level CSE definition) and Sports Equipment, Shoes, or Jerseys:

Try out the CSE here: https://cse.google.com/cse?cx=000888210889775888983:-nzsrilglze