Programmable Search Engine Blog
The latest news, updates and tips from the Programmable Search Engine team
Web Search APIs: The next generation
Friday, April 17, 2009
Posted by: Rajat Mukherjee, Group Product Manager
If you are going to the
World Wide Web conference
in Madrid next week (April 20-24), make sure to attend the
panel
entitled "Web Search APIs: The Next Generation". Nick Weininger from the Custom Search team will be on the panel. He's going to talk about real-world needs from a Search API, and how the
Custom Search API
provides various customization options for indexing, ranking, navigation, presentation and monetization.
Don't miss the
panel
!
Check out details on the WWW 2009
conference program
.
Google Services for Websites includes Custom Search
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Posted by:
Radu Cornea, Software Engineer and Kevin Godzilla Lim, Technical Writer
As you might have read on the
Official Google Blog
today, Google is launching
Google Services for Websites
, a new program that lets partners offer Google services — including
Custom Search
,
Site Search
,
Webmaster Tools
, and
AdSense
— to their users.
Partners, such as hosting providers and blogging platforms, can integrate these services into their own management consoles, making the services easily accessible to their users. Google Services for Websites allows partners to create Google accounts, submit
Sitemaps
to Webmaster Tools, configure Custom Search, and provision new AdSense accounts on behalf of customers. Additionally, partners are eligible for referral fees for certain services.
Once Google Services for Websites has been integrated into the control panel, users can configure their Google services in minutes. These services can help increase website traffic, provide site search, and monetize website content.
In fact, a number of
web hosting providers
have already integrated these services into their offerings.
Furthermore, all of these services are designed to complement and enhance one another. For example, Sitemaps submitted to Webmaster Tools not only improve the discoverability of websites on Google search, but also improve coverage and
freshness
in the Custom Search index. AdSense accounts can also be associated with search, which lets website owners earn revenues from relevant ads displayed alongside search results.
To learn more about integrating Google Services for Websites with your services, read the Google Services for Websites
program overview
.
Integrating Custom Search with your service
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Posted by:
Kevin Gollum Lim, Technical Writer
Most people who need something just go to the store to get the item, but a number of people take the time and effort to handcraft their own stuff. They do that because they enjoy tinkering with things until they work just the way they like them. Well, Custom Search has a group of developers who are like that, and they want to create and share their tools.
For such developers, we have good news. We launched a new API that lets other services connect to Custom Search. You can programmatically create, update, and delete search engines without going through the Custom Search control panel. In fact, the API offers most of the functionality that the Custom Search platform provides, and we're working on supporting the rest.
If you provide a service such as hosting websites or blogs, you can partner with Google to create custom search engines for your users. You can use the API to integrate Custom Search into your management console. Your users can then create search engines using your service and will need to use the Custom Search control panel only if they want to be more involved in the customization of their search engines. In our
previous blog entry
, we talked about how several web hosting providers have already done this. (If you are a web hosting provider who wants to integrate search into the sites you host, please
ping
us.)
Even if you are not providing a service for a large set of users, you could still create a lot of cool things with the API. Here are a few ideas: If you have a list of websites that change frequently, you can automate the updating of your annotations file; if you have a content management system, you could create search for all your webpages and even create search labels based on your existing categories; if you are a blogging platform, you can enable search for all your blogs.
To learn more about the new API, read the
programmer's guide
.
Home delivery of Custom Search to webmasters
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Posted by:
Radu Cornea, Software Engineer and Rajat Mukherjee, Group Product Manager
Until today, when you wanted to add Google Custom Search to your site, you had to head directly to our
Custom Search Engine site
. Although creating your own Google-powered search engine only takes a few minutes, we thought it might be easier if we
delivered
this functionality right to where many of you manage your sites online. Choice is a beautiful thing.
If you own a website hosted on
IPOWER
,
StartLogic
,
PowWeb
,
FatCow
,
BizLand
,
EasyCGI
and several other web hosting providers, you can now configure Custom Search right in your hoster's management console - these hosters now support both
Webmaster Tools
and
Custom Search
. It's like having pizza delivered to your door instead of having to drive over to the pizza parlour!
When you sign up for the service, you get the following benefits, all from the comfort of your hoster's control panel:
a Google account is automatically created for you - you don't have to remember additional passwords or login to use these Google services
you can generate search engines for your websites by simply identifying your domains
shortcuts are provided to manage your Webmaster Tools account and your Custom Search Engines
Sitemaps
for URLs on your sites can be automatically submitted to Webmaster Tools for better indexing on Google.com
your Custom Search engines will automatically recognize and use the submitted Sitemaps for enhanced indexing coverage
you can make money by associating your
Adsense
publisher ID with your search engines and sharing advertising revenue with Google
you can upgrade your search engines to use
Site Search
for further control over branding, presentation (via XML results) and
On-Demand indexing
If your site is hosted by one of the above providers, give it a try - go to your hoster's console and add a search box to your site if you don't already have one. High quality search
improves user experience
, and also directly increases user engagement and improves conversions on web sites.
Additionally,
let us know
if there are things about this integrated service offering that we can improve. Our
programmer's guide
provides more details about the new Custom Search APIs that allow programmatic creation and management of Custom Search engines. If you are a web site hoster interested in incorporating these Google webmaster services into your platform, please
contact us
.
Searching the Google Timeline
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Posted by:
Tyler Morse, Software Engineer and Dylan Casey, Product Manager
When we set out to build a
timeline
to commemorate Google's 10th birthday, we wanted to add an experimental search feature. We may be a little biased, but because we needed to search a specific subset of the web, and needed customized presentation, we decided to use
Google Site Search
, which is powered by the Custom Search platform. Using Site Search, the team designed a customized user interface and user experience, tightly embedded within the timeline application, in a few days.
The Google Timeline data is stored and served up as static files of JavaScript objects and arrays. While this was very efficient for the Timeline JavaScript application, we needed to massage the data in order to get it indexed and searchable, as well as tie it back to the timeline objects.
We generated static HTML files for all timeline events. The filenames have identifying data in them that allow us to correlate a search result with the original event; this way, we can translate a user click on a search result to the appropriate timeline event. Since we wanted explicit control of event dates, we also encoded the event date in each HTML file.
We use Site Search's flexible
XML interface
for retrieving the results. When we get back search results, we parse the XML data, extract specifically the information we need, and render these results.
Since we did not want to take users away from the timeline application, we presented the results inline. As we had limited real estate available, we only displayed 3 results at a time. As shown in the screenshot above, we added pagination to the results section, and the ability to sort the events by event date.
We couldn't treat our search results like typical URLs, as on Google.com. We wanted to show users the event within the actual timeline when they clicked on a search result, instead of navigating them to the indexed static HTML file. Clicking on a result provides an interactive experience, and brings up the specific timeline event.
The end result: a Google search for Google's history,
custom
fit to meet the specific needs of our timeline, just before we blew out the candles on our cake.
On-Demand Indexing for a fast-moving web
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Posted by:
Tom Duerig and Nicholas Weininger, Software Engineers
Earlier this year when we
launched Google Site Search
, and AdSense for Search
started using
the Custom Search platform, we created a special Custom Search Engine (CSE) index for enhanced indexing. Webmasters could submit
Sitemaps
in
Webmaster Tools
, and the Custom Search platform indexed URLs from these Sitemaps into a special CSE index for more comprehensive coverage.
This solved an important problem: the need for
enhanced index coverage
for site search. The special CSE index, in addition to the Google index, enabled us to search deeper on selected sites, providing higher search quality.
Today, with our launch of
On-Demand Indexing
, we're addressing the need to provide fast indexing for your important, frequently-changing content. On-Demand indexing allows anyone with a Google Custom Search Engine or Google Site Search to identify and tell us about new pages or recent site changes by submitting a Sitemap to our Webmaster Tools. You can then select this
specific
Sitemap in the Indexing tab of your CSE control panel and hit the new "Index Now" button. We will immediately schedule the relevant pages for crawling and indexing, and these pages will be included in your search results usually within 24 hours - often much faster.
We realize that new or frequently updated content is often crucial to a website. In order to give you more control over how you use the On-Demand Index resources allocated to you, we will honor the
priority
and
lastmod
attributes that you provide in your
Sitemap
- this means you can identify what URLs should be given preference. Please ensure that your Sitemap metadata is up-to-date.
On-Demand Indexing uses a special index that is designed just for Custom Search. The main Google search indexing process is separate and uses different selection criteria, so submitting pages for On-Demand Indexing will not make them appear any faster in the main Google index, or impact ranking on Google.com. For more information on On-Demand Indexing, as well as the allocation per CSE, please refer to our
FAQ
.
We are always listening at our
Custom Search discussion group
, so please continue to tell us what features you'd like to see added to Custom Search.
Knol - now with Custom Search
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Posted by:
Cedric Dupont, Product Manager
Knol
is a project aimed at helping people share their knowledge
.
Knols (units of knowledge) are authoritative articles written by people about a specific subject, ranging from
tooth pain
to
solar energy
to
buttermilk pancakes
. With all of these knols to browse, our readers have been begging us for a more powerful search tool. Well, today we have good news - we've added the power of Custom Search to Knol.
Custom Search gives us all of the speed and relevance of Google's search technology, but required none of the hard labor that went into making Google search what it is today. With Custom Search, Knol visitors will have a fast search experience that features all of the bells and whistles Google searchers have come to love (including our advanced spell checker). When you search within
Knol
, the search results look a little different from Web Search results (see this
search for knee surgery
, for instance). We were able to maintain that distinct feel for Knol search by taking advantage of the Custom Search XML results format (via
Google Site Search
) and creating the search result display that we wanted.
We want to hear from you if you have feedback on Knol search. Please
leave your comment on our help page
.
Archive
2026
Feb
Jan
2024
Apr
2023
Dec
Oct
Jun
2022
Aug
Jul
Jun
Feb
2021
Apr
Jan
2020
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jun
Apr
2019
Jul
Jun
Apr
2018
Jul
2017
Jul
Feb
2014
Mar
2013
Dec
Oct
Sep
Mar
Jan
2012
Aug
Jun
May
Mar
Feb
Jan
2011
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2010
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2009
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2008
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2007
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2006
Dec
Nov
Useful links
Programmable Search Engine
Help Center
Support Forum
Developer Documentation
Google AdSense Blog
