Spanking new developer guide

Wednesday, June 11, 2008 at 2:14 PM

Posted by: Kevin Grendelzilla Lim, Technical Writer

We created a new developer guide from scratch and moved it to code.google.com, where many other API documents reside. This means that the bells and whistles of Google Code are available to the Custom Search developer guide. For example, you can now search for information across multiple APIs (Not that we're bragging, but Custom Search powers the search on that website).

Fine, we'll admit that the new doc is not exactly a-thrill-a-minute, but it's definitely stuffed with more examples (and pretty pictures). The new organization, navigation, and search box make it easier for you to find information. The guide also discusses background information, explains complex concepts, makes recommendations, and points you to the right direction.

We're still tinkering with the doc and adding more stuff into it. We'll keep you posted about our progress.

Happy reading!

Custom Search at the core of Google Site Search

Tuesday, June 03, 2008 at 1:47 AM

Posted by: Matt Wytock and Vrishali Wagle, Software Engineers

Today, we announced Google Site Search, a hosted website search product that takes advantage of the Custom Search platform to offer high quality search to any website. Google Site Search integrates features that offer site visitors a search experience closer to what they're used to on Google.com. Here are a few of the new features:

• Expanded coverage: We already search through all of your pages that are in the Google.com index. Tell us about more pages on your site by submitting a Sitemap. We'll crawl your Sitemap and add these pages to your custom search engine so that your search engine has the maximum coverage. (These additional pages will only be available to your custom search engine; your PageRank and Google.com rankings won't change in any way.)

• Custom Synonyms: You can now define custom synonyms for your custom search engine. For example, you can define "cd" as meaning"certificate of deposit." When a visitor searches for "cd" on your search engine, we will return pages that contain either "cd" or "certificate of deposit." You can specify these synonyms in the XML definition of your search engine.

• Date Biasing: Fine-tune the relevance of search results by specifying a bias for newer documents. We allow various levels of biasing, the highest of which approximately sorts by date.

• Top Results Biasing: If you want the first N results to always match a refinement, you can specify that as a property of the refinement. We will try to fill up the top N positions with results matching that refinement before showing other relevant results.

We're not done with Custom Search and are always thinking about ways to add new features. Stay tuned, as we've only just begun.

Custom Search expands to AdSense for Search

Tuesday, May 06, 2008 at 9:42 AM

Posted by: Vrishali Wagle and Tom Duerig, Software Engineers

Since the launch of Custom Search, we've seen more and more webmasters, publishers and organizations enable high-quality search engines on their web sites and blogs to help their users find what they're looking for. Thanks to your continuous feedback, we've been able add new features and global support, resulting in even more growth.

Now, the Custom Search platform is expanding further by simultaneously improving our indexing for your search engine and broadening our reach to power AdSense for Search. AdSense publishers can now create Custom Search Engines (CSEs) and take advantage of the most popular customization features right within their AdSense accounts.

As you may know, Custom Search is built on top of the Google index, which means that pages that are available on Google.com are also available to your search engine. In addition, Custom Search now maintains its own index for enhanced coverage for web sites included in CSEs.

If you have pages that aren't currently being indexed in Google.com, you can let us know about these pages by submitting a Sitemap through Webmaster Tools, and pages in your Sitemap that aren't included in the Google index will be detected and indexed for your search engine. Improved index coverage is not instantaneous as it takes some time for the pages to be crawled and indexed. Please also note that this improved indexing only affects search results within the search engine you create, not your rank and indexing on Google.com.

We'd like to welcome all AdSense publishers to the Custom Search community! By growing our community, we're hoping to work with more of you to help users across the web find exactly what they're searching for.

Searching for Creative Commons licensed content

Wednesday, April 23, 2008 at 5:52 PM

Posted by: Tania Bedrax-Weiss, Software Engineer

If you've ever wanted to let your users only see content that is free to use and share (such as through Creative Commons), here are a few tips on how to do it. Assuming you've indicated the CC license in your pages, you can now specify that you want only content with specific licensing terms to show up in your CSE. We've made available four labels for CSE creators to use based on the CC licenses:

• free_use_share (by-nc-nd)
• free_use_share_commercially (by-nd)
• free_use_share_modify (by-nc-sa)
• free_use_share_modify_commercially (by-sa)

You can either use one of these labels as a background label to restrict all of your content to these terms, or you can reference these labels in the facet items section of the CSE specification and they will be exposed to users as additional refinements in your CSE. Note that these are filter labels; you cannot boost according to these labels.

As you generate content, please keep in mind that there are a number of ways Creative Commons licenses may be added to an HTML doc:

1. with <rdf:RDF>...</rdf:RDF> in the HTML head or body
2. using <meta name="DC.rights" content=uri of cc license>
3. using <a rel="license" href=uri of cc license>
4. using <rdf:RDF>...</rdf:RDF> in a comment

If your documents use any of these methods, we likely already have licensing information. See for example: http://joshua.smcvt.edu/linearalgebra/ that illustrates method number 3:

<a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/"> ...

and also illustrates method number 4:

<!-- <rdf:RDF xmlns="http://web.resource.org/cc/" ... >
<License rdf:about="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/">...
</License>
</rdf:RDF> -->

See the file source for the complete text and don't forget to visit our Webmaster Central for more information.

Labels in Custom Search

Thursday, March 27, 2008 at 7:49 AM

Posted by: Phil Liao, Software Engineer

Last month we demonstrated how to specify URL patterns in your CSE. We now explain another powerful concept in Custom Search: labels, which are also known as refinements. Labels are typically displayed above the search results.

Let's revisit our I Love Veggies search engine. When the user searches for "eggplant", we display some categorical refinements above her search results such as: recipes, nutrition, farmer's markets, and growing tips. When she clicks the "recipes" refinement, for example, our CSE emphasizes eggplant recipes in her search results.

To make refinements, do the following:

1. Create refinement labels.

To add a refinement to your custom search engine, go to the Refinements tab in the control panel, then click the Add Refinement button. Enter a refinement label and its associated keywords, and choose how to prioritize the labeled sites. You can enter one of our predefined refinements or create one of your own.

2. Tag sites with refinement labels.

Once you have configured your refinements, go to the Sites tab in the control panel. Choose some sites (URL patterns) using the checkboxes, then choose a label from the Label actions drop-down list. You can attach any number of labels to each site. For example, if a site includes nutritional information with its recipes, you could label it with both the "recipes" and the "nutrition" refinements. Labeling your sites properly enables your users to find sites that are relevant to each refinement. In addition, by showing meaningful labels under each search result, you enable your users to find similar results quickly. The Custom Search Help Center has helpful hints on how to choose good refinements.

And this is how to create refinements and assign their labels to your sites using the Custom Search control panel. We'll show you advanced refinement management using XML in another post soon.

Making the most with AdSense

Tuesday, March 18, 2008 at 9:39 AM

Posted by: Talia Brodecki, AdSense Product Marketing

If you're currently making money from CSE with AdSense, here are a few optimization tips to help you improve your current performance. (If you're not already earning money this way, scroll down to learn more about how you can start doing so, using your search box.)

1) Search box placement: Search boxes should be easy to find, typically under the header or on the left navigation bar, to encourage users to simply search for what they're looking for instead of spending time browsing through your content. Try to keep your search box in the same place on every page so users know where to return for future searches.

2) Two search boxes per page: For pages with a lot of content, we recommend placing two search boxes per page - one at the top of the page where users can immediately go to to find what they're looking for and one at the bottom of the page where users can quickly search for something else after reading the content on the page. You can track the performance of each by creating a custom channel.

3) iFRAME: By choosing to host the search results, you can integrate search results and ads within your site so users don't leave your site when they perform a search. If users don't find what they're looking for in the search results, they can easily click to another section of your site through your site's template.

4) Search box on search results page: Remember to place another search box on your search results page in the case that a user wants to perform another search.

5) Ad placement: For better monetization, we recommend choosing to place ads at the top & right of the search results for added visibility.

6) Appearance customization: Customize the search results with your site's colors to match the look and feel.

If you aren't using AdSense, we encourage you to sign up and get paid for every valid click on ads you're already showing. Just go to the Make Money link in the CSE control panel and fill out the short form to sign up for an account. If you already have an AdSense account, you can easily link the two to start earning money immediately.

Now then -- better go figure out what to buy with all that extra cash. ;)

Custom Search on Google Help Centers

Tuesday, March 04, 2008 at 3:09 PM

Posted by: Christine Moschella, Online Operations

Custom Search Engines (CSEs) are powerful tools for searching over the pages of your site, as well as providing links to your favorite resources across the web. Because they provide great search functionality with the option to specify a subset of Google's web index, they're perfect for us to use in our Google Help Centers.

We've rolled out CSEs to many of our product Help Centers already, including the Custom Search Help Center, and we're also using it on our main Google Help page.

The Help Center search engines use several key features of CSEs such as refinements and labels to identify result sources, and Subscribed Links for certain help queries, like this one in the Analytics Help Center.

Because Help Center searches will now include content from product pages, developer documentation, Google blogs, and help groups, we hope that search will be an even more effective tool to help you find answers to your Google product questions. For example, failed searches - searches that don't return any results - decreased by 23% on the Analytics Help Center after we added a CSE.