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