Customize Your Google Search
by Elise Bauer

Google recently released a very cool new feature. Google is now letting us create our own custom search engines, based on a list of websites that we choose. I've started playing around with it here at FoodBlogSearch.com. I often like to link to other food blogs in my posts on my recipe blog and this custom search makes it easy to search the food blogs I frequent.

Google is also letting us put the search bar, and the results of the searches directly into our own websites. I have an example of that working here at my list of food blogs. Susan V has also incorporated this feature in her list of food blogs on FatFree Vegan Kitchen.

You can set it up so other people can contribute to the list of sites searched. You can include a little Google widget so that people can add the search bar to their personalized Google home page.

It's not perfect. It returns results based on page rank and not the most recent entries. It usually takes a week or two for new entries to show up in the Google index so you usually don't get the most recent posts. But I have already found it quite useful. The link to create your own custom search engine is http://www.google.com/coop/.

Providing a focused search engine on your site can be a benefit to your readers, if your content is focused on a particular area.

If you create your own custom search engine for your blog, please let us know about in in the comments.

Enjoy!

Submitted by Elise Bauer (view blog) on Sun, 11/05/2006 - 18:00
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Comments

 

I've always found those

I've always found those google site searchers frustrating and never get any closer to what I was looking for. I usually give up and move one. Hopefully this new one will be better.

Moe
BigGirlBlue
Large & Lovely

"Women are going to form a chain, a greater sisterhood than the world has ever known." ~Nellie McClung, 1916

Submitted by biggirlblue on Mon, 11/06/2006 - 08:06
 

Great Tip

Thanks for tip. It is a good tool for parents and teachers to help show their children or students the basics of search engines.

How long did it take for you to understand and use it effectively? (from a teacher's point-of-view)

lia from luebeck, germany

Author of the media safe 101 page on the Red Tent Blog and the personal yum yum cafe.

Submitted by Lia on Mon, 11/06/2006 - 08:10
 

Hi BigGirlBlue - I have been

Hi BigGirlBlue - I have been using the plain vanilla site search on a couple of my blogs for quite some time and have been more or less satisfied with the results. Better, actually, than using my blog software (Movable Type) built in search function. For my own site search I like the ranked relevance returns. For the custom search across many blogs, I would prefer it if they gave us a choice to select search returns that were listed by most recent first. But I do like the fact that I am searching my favorite blogs, the ones I would go to and search individually, if not for the custom search.

Hi Lia - I set it up initially within minutes. It took at least an hour to put in all the sites I wanted in the search, as I was adding them manually. I found it pretty easy myself. Getting the collaboration to work the way I wanted it to was a little tiring, but I'm assuming that since the product is in Beta that it will improve.

Elise Bauer
Simply Recipes
Learning Movable Type

Submitted by Elise Bauer on Mon, 11/06/2006 - 20:12
 

Re: Site search

I've been using FreeFind for all of my sites search needs for years - it's wonderful. For those people looking for a dedicated site search (I use the Data Search), I'd highly recommend checking them out.
http://www.freefind.com

-Bob
bobafifi.com

usedviolins.com

fluteplayer.net

Submitted by bobafifi on Mon, 11/06/2006 - 20:30