Our users have been telling us that while they love the concept of on-demand indexing, manually entering URLs or keeping a Sitemap up to date is too cumbersome.  A new year brings a new and improved solution.  If you are a Webmaster Tools verified site owner and have a page that links to your site’s latest content, simply provide us with that page’s URL and we will periodically visit it to discover your site’s new content.

For example, as the owners of this blog, we can provide the URL of the blog’s landing page, googlecustomsearch.blogspot.com, to our CSE.  It will then periodically visit that URL and add any new links to content on this blog to our CSE’s index.  Since this URL automatically links to all new content on this blog, our CSE’s index will always automatically get updated.

You can provide a URL(s) to your CSE via the URLs linked from a page feature in the Indexing page of your CSE’s Control Panel.  Note that this feature is only for the discovery of new content and does not refresh content that has already been indexed.  

To learn more about URLs linked from a page, please visit our help center. Let us know what you think in our discussion forum.

Posted by: Liqian Luo, Software Engineer

The Custom Search engineers spent 2011 launching great features. But we still hear from our users that our documentation could do with improvement. We hear you. Today we’re launching some updates to our docs:

• Comprehensive JavaScript reference for the Custom Search Element. We’ve completely overhauled our Custom Search Element API documentation to provide a comprehensive overview of all the JavaScript methods available. We can’t wait to see what you build with it.


• More languages. The Help Center is now available in Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish.


• Easier navigation and cleaner design. We’ve reorganized the Help Center to make it easier to find the information you’re looking for. Navigation is simpler and more streamlined. Individual articles have been revised and updated, and designed to be more readable.

Documentation is an ongoing effort, and we’ll be continuing to improve both our Help Center and our developer documentation. If you have comments or suggestions, we’d love to see them in our user forum.

Posted by: Riona MacNamara, technical writer

Custom Search Autocompletions allow you to add to the list of useful queries users see as they type in the search box. Today we are announcing two major improvements.

Promotions in Autocomplete:

Promotions are a great way to call special attention to a result by putting it at the top of search results and making it visually distinct. Now you can choose to display them in autocomplete too. To enable this feature, simply click Show promotions in autocomplete in the Promotions section of your CSE’s Control Panel. Note that promotions based on regular expressions or the $q variable will not appear in autocomplete.

If you’d like to have promotions that appear in autocomplete but not in search results, you can add them via the new Autocomplete Promotion tab of the Custom Autocompletions in the Autocompletion section of your CSE’s Control Panel.

Match mode:

Match mode give you options for how Google displays autocompletions. The following are now available in the Promotions section of your CSE’s Control Panel. Changes to match mode will require you to update the CSE code snippet on your site.

• Prefix (default) mode matches the opening words of the user’s query: “how to bake” will trigger “how to bake a pie”.
• Ordered mode doesn’t require the words to be in the opening, but their order must match the user’s query: “bake a pie” will trigger “how to bake a pie”.
• Any mode matches regardless of the order of the words in the user’s query. “pie bake” will trigger “how to bake a pie”.

We hope these new options make autocompletions even more useful for your site. Read more about Promotions in Autocomplete and Match mode. Let us know what you think in our discussion forum.

Posted by: Min Zeng, Software Engineer

Since the launch of Custom Search in 2006, CSE has powered searches on a broad range of sites on the web. Until now, those CSEs have only returned text-based results, but in some cases images can be a much faster, easier and more visually appealing way to search. For photos-focused sites, image results are a great way to showcase your beautiful photos and help visitors to your site quickly and easily find the photos they want. We also think sites focused on news, celebrities, art and digital production assets will similarly benefit.

Now you can add an image results tab to your CSE to offer your visitors image-only results in a variety of image-optimized presentation formats. Once you enable this feature, your CSE will have two tabs. The first has your current web search results and the second, Image tab, contains the image search results. Here’s an example from India-Forums.com:

Enabling image results is easy! Just visit the Basics page of your CSE’s Control Panel and check the Enable image search checkbox. You can change the layout of your image results on the Look and feel page.

Once enabled, you’ll also be able to get separate image search reports from your CSE’s Statistics page.

This new feature is available to all users of our Custom Search Element (you will need to Get Code and update your site). Since we are transitioning all iframe users to the Element, this should be most sites. Our Google Site Search users can also access Image Results via XML. To learn more about Image Search for Custom Search, please visit our help center. Let us know what you think in our discussion forum.

Update: check out the New York Times Image Search app powered by Google Custom Search.

Posted by: Peng Zhao, Software Engineer

Custom Search promotions enable you to put relevant information at the top of your search results for specific queries.

Today, we’re announcing several new features to give you more flexibility on how and when to trigger them.

Regular expressions: Use regular expressions instead of verbatim query matches to make it easier to display your promotions for all relevant user queries.

Promotion URL and titles based on the user’s query: Instead of manually adding and maintaining a long list of similarly structured URLs and promotion titles, now you can use the $q variable in your promotion URL or title to replace it with the user’s query.

Enable/disable individual promotions: Manually enable or disable each promotion without affecting the others.

Promotions for Custom Search engines created in AdSense: Promotions now work for these CSEs (though they are still managed via the CSE’s control panel on the Google Custom Search site).

We hope these new features make it easier for you to use promotions on your site. For more details and instructions, please visit our help center. Let us know what you think in our discussion forum.

Posted by: Weiyu Zhu, Software Engineer

In August we transitioned all Google-hosted Custom Search Engines to the Custom Search Element. Now we are transitioning iframe CSEs as well. No work is required from CSE owners. Moving from the iframe option to the Element enables those CSEs to take advantage of our latest features, like automatic thumbnails.

If you had an iframe CSE, we encourage you to visit your Control Panel to find new tools for customized presentation and results. As always, we appreciate your feedback in the user forum.

Posted by: Liang Ch'ng, Software Engineer

As we announced in our Official Google Blog post, Custom Search technology is powering the new National Resource Directory (NRD) job search engine of more than 500,000 job openings from employers around the country. This initiative is a creative application of structured search to provide a highly customized search experience.

Want to learn more about how this works? First of all, like all custom search engines, this uses the power and scale of Google search to constantly crawl the web, looking for structured data to add to the Google index. In this case, sites like simplyhired.com have added JobPosting markup from Schema.org to their sites to help search engines identify veteran-committed job openings, job title, job location, etc.

Recognizing that many job seekers are interested in jobs in their local area, the NRD did some extra work to support a location-based search. When a user specifies a location such as a city or a zipcode in a search, the location is converted into a list of nearby cities with normalized names that match those location markups in the job posting webpages.

To restrict results to only the relevant job postings, for every user query on their site, NRD sends a well formed query request to Google Custom Search including structured search operators such as filtering by cities and job codes and sorting by date to receive XML results and render them on their site.

We’re happy to contribute to this important initiative and hope the power of Google Custom Search can help more businesses to deliver creative search solutions for their users.

Posted by: Hui Xu, Technical Lead, Custom Search Team