Programmable Search Engine Blog
The latest news, updates and tips from the Programmable Search Engine team
Simpler pricing for Site Search
Friday, November 12, 2010
Based on user feedback, we’ve simplified our pricing for
Google Site Search
, our hosted search offering for businesses and organizations that want Google-quality search on their sites without ads.
To date, we’ve charged for Google Site Search based on both the number of submitted search queries and the number of pages indexed. Our new pricing is based only on queries. It is much simpler and scales to accommodate the size of your organization.
A bonus -- as part of this change, we’ve doubled the allocation for
On-Demand pages
indexed per search engine.
For more details, please check
our post
on the Google Enterprise Blog.
Posted by: Hui Xu, Staff Software Engineer
New Google APIs Console features a new Custom Search API
Monday, November 1, 2010
Today, we
announced
the
Google APIs console
, a new tool to help you use our product APIs in your applications and on your websites. Included in the console is a new Custom Search API.
We’ve enhanced our Custom Search offering with the introduction of new output formats and a new API. Now, in addition to using the
Custom Search element
or the
XML API
, the new API offers search results using your choice of Atom or JSON syndication formats. For more information, please refer to
our post
on the Google Code blog.
Posted by: Adam Feldman, Product Manager and Rajat Mukherjee, Group Product Manager
Control over your Autocompletions
Thursday, October 7, 2010
Query autocompletion
has been the most popular feature in the history of Custom Search. Users love it, and websites use it to help people find alternate queries that get them to the right information faster.
Since launch, one of the most commonly requested features has been administrative control over the autocompletions that surface when people start typing their queries. We’re happy to announce that you can now control inclusions and exclusions to autocompletions.
For example, on our sample restaurant review search engine, typing “
che
” triggers an autocompletion for “
cheese
” and not “
cheese jalapeno poppers
", one of our tasty snacks. Typing “
chicken
” did uncover “
chicken livers
” (ugh!) but did not propose “
chicken tandoori
”, an interesting menu item that we’d like to promote to our users.
With the new inclusion and exclusion options in the control panel, managing autocompletions is a breeze: we just added “
cheese
” and “
chicken livers
” to the list of
exclusions
, and inserted “
chicken tandoori
” and “
cheese jalapeno poppers
” into the
included
autocompletion list.
A few hours of processing, and the new autocomplete modifications kick in.
We hope you enjoy the new controls that further enhance autocompletions on your search engine. You can even upload included and excluded autocompletions
in bulk
in the control panel. Let us know if you have any
feedback
, and enjoy your spicy cheese poppers!
Posted by: Andy Herrman, Software Engineer and Salmaan Rashid, Senior Technical Solutions Engineer
Themed ads in Custom Search
Friday, September 10, 2010
Last year, we took a big step forward towards improved customization of the look and feel of results by providing
plug-n-play themes
in the Custom Search
Element
. This allowed people to select from among a palette of predefined styles. You can find a style that matches your website and deploy search, or
further
customize the style if required.
Today, we’re taking themes one step further. Each theme now has ads rendered with a different look and feel to match the overall style used for the search results.
The outcome is harmony between search results and ads, which we think makes for a great user experience. The following screenshots are examples of search results and ads rendered with three different themes -
espresso
,
minimalist
and
green sky
.
We hope you agree that your visitors will enjoy themed ads. As always, be sure to send us your
feedback
.
Posted by: Ben Lisbakken, Software Engineer and John Skidgel, Senior Interaction Designer
JibJab + Google Site Search = more laughs
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Today’s guest post comes from Chris Poe, Engineering Director at JibJab Media
The folks at
JibJab
are good at doing two things: Making people laugh and... Okay, so maybe weʼre REALLY good at one thing: Making people laugh. Finding the perfect birthday eCard for your friends and family has always been a priority for us here at JibJab. We all felt that search would be the perfect compliment to our existing browsing experience and then we discovered
Google Site Search
... our wildest dreams were about to become reality.
Seriously. We get search functionality without having to build search functionality.
The beauty of Google Site Search is that it can all be done with a small addition to your web page markup and no change to the back end of your web application.
Using the
PageMaps
functionality Site Search provides, we are able to embed metadata in our web pages that will be returned in our Site Search query results. This lets us format the data you are looking for in a very JibJabby way.
With features like
Autocompletions
and
Refinements
, we will be able to evolve the Site Search functionality on our site and help our users make people laugh for a long time to come.
Posted by:
Chris Poe, Engineering Director at JibJab Media
Autocompletion of queries in Custom Search
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
One of the most requested features for Custom Search is autocompletion of queries. Today,
we announced at Google I/O
that you can now enable query autocompletions for your search engine.
The screenshot below shows an example of query autocompletion at
Travelocity
.
Custom Search autocompletion is similar to what you see on Google.com—optional queries appear as you type your query in the search box. However, behind the scenes, we do a lot of things differently. We created a different algorithm that uses data from multiple sources, including queries to your search engine, as well as keywords and phrases extracted automatically from the content of websites that your search engine covers.
Because the autocompleted queries are based, in part, on the specific content of the webpages covered by your search engine, we will
not
generate autocompletions for custom search engines that search the entire web, i.e., autocompletions will only work if you set your preferences to
Search only included sites
in the control panel.
To enable autocompletions, select
Enable autocompletions
in the Basics tab of the control panel.
After you’ve saved your settings, replace the code for the search box in your website with the search box code from the
Get code
tab and you're done. Please note that it can take a few hours for us to start generating autocompletion queries for your search engine.
If you are using the Custom Search Element with a
theme
, the autocompletions are styled to match the look and feel of your theme. Autocompletions will also work on high-end
mobile devices
.
We hope that you find the feature useful. As always, give us
feedback
so we can improve the feature.
Posted by: Bartlomiej Niechwiej and Jeffrey Scudder,
Software Engineers
New Site Search features, upgrades for Adobe Creative Suite 5
Friday, April 30, 2010
The just-released
Adobe® Creative Suite 5
(CS5) now includes a
new Community Help
application, powered by Google Site Search. It’s an Adobe AIR®-based companion that’s automatically installed as part of any new Adobe CS5 product.
Launched directly from the Help menu of any CS5 product, the Community Help application provides a customized search experience across about 3000 sites. Customers can find fast answers with powerful new options to focus results just on Adobe content, community content, developer resources, and even code samples.
The Adobe development team used the XML API to integrate search results and also create unique innovations such as Code Search. Formerly known as
Blueprint
(
demonstrated
at Google I/O last year) this new search option allows Adobe Flash® and Flex developers to search for relevant code samples so that they can write better code, faster.
Community Help can also be used as a standalone application. To give Community Help a try, you can
download
it from adobe.com.
To learn more about how Adobe Community Help uses Site Search, see our blog post on the
Google Enterprise Blog
.
Posted by: Rajat Mukherjee, Group Product Manager, Search
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