Wednesday, November 8, 2006

Specialized results in your search engine



Many of you have told us that it would be useful to be able to add Subscribed Links to your Custom Search Engines (CSEs). That way, you could include all sorts of real-time status data and helpful answers in your customized search results pages, and take advantage of the wide variety of special search features already available from otherSubscribed Links creators.

We thought that was a good idea too, so we implemented it. Now you can list the Subscribed Links you want to add in the XML specification of your CSE, and just like that, they'll appear in your customized search results. Our documentation tells you how and illustrates with an example.

Some special search features you can add this way include:

  1. Real-time flight status information from FlightStats or subway train times from TrainCheck.
  2. Article snippets from Wikipedia and Answers.com.
  3. News from Digg and IGN.
  4. Demographic information from CityTownInfo.

Browse our directory to get an idea of the things Subscribed Links can do to enhance your results. Or make your own and share your expertise with your own users and other CSE creators while you design the best results for queries in your domain of knowledge.

Last but not least, we also wanted to mention that a number of advanced Co-op users have requested the ability to download all their annotations, including those created using the Google Marker. You can now do so by going to the advanced tab of your control panel and get your annotations in XML or in a tab delimited format.