Returning visitors are an important part of a successful web site. And if you give them something special, some boon that your competitors don’t offer, chances are your visitors will come back. Building your blog or web site and researching your topic you have most likely gained knowledge that your users could benefit from. Why not offer them a customized search engine that draws on that knowledge?

Here are introductions to three great tools for making a customized search engine. They are all easy to use and embed. Find the one that meets your needs and get cracking.

Rollyo

If what you need is simply search engine that will search a specific set of web sites, Rollyo is a simple and fun way to do it. It’s this easy:

• Go to the Rollyo site and sign up for an account.
• Click Create Searchroll.
• Give your search engine a name. Be descriptive.
• Enter up to 25 web sites. This is where you get to show your expertise.
• If you want to, choose one of 18 categories for your search engine to be listed in.
• You also have the option to add some tags (comma separated) to define the area your search engine is covering.

Now go to the Dashboard from the Rollyo web site and choose the tool Searchbox from the right hand menu. Here you enter your site name and your sites web address. If you have made more than one search engine (called Searchrolls), pick the one you want to embed, choose from five looks, copy the code and paste it on your site.

It’s that easy and it’s guaranteed to make your site or blog more interesting for your users.

Swicki

If you feel a little more adventureous, why not try a Swicki? A Swicki is a community powered customized search engine, tailor made to produce targeted search results for your visitors. With every search, vote and click, your Swicki generates more relevant results and turns into a valuable asset for you and your community.

The Swicki has a couple of interesting extra features: You can choose if you want to search text or videos and, o give shortcuts to popular key words or search terms, the Swicki will show a buzz cloud next to the search field. This swarm of words that gives you an idea of what is hot in the community.

The look, size and shape of the Swicki can be customized to fit the design of your site or blog seamlessly.

In a few clicks, the Swicki Tour shows you how to make your own. I made Pandia’s Swicki in 10 minutes.

Google Custom Search

Google Custom Search has more options. It lets you build a search engine that includes one website, multiple websites, or specific web pages. You can customize the colors and add a logo to match your existing web pages. If you like, you can host the search box and results on your own website. Here’s how to do it:

Go to Google Custom Search and click on the big blue button encouraging you to create a custom search engine. This brings you to a simple web form. Pay special attention to these two points:

• Under the header What do you want to search? you have 3 alternatives to choose from. If you choose the third, The entire Web, all you get is a Google search box for your site. The two other options give you a chance to shine:

  The first alternative, Only sites I select creates a search engine that searches, say, your favorite sites on caring for guinea pigs.

  The second alternative,The entire web, but emphasize sites I select, will search Google’s whole index, but give a boost to results from sites you pick.

  So you need to decide whether you want this to be the only material searched or if you want to trust Google’s general search result in the mix. Your choice will depend, among other things, on the nature of your topic and the number of quality sites on your list.

• This brings us to the second important point: Under the header Select some sites, enter a list of those hand picked, high quality sites that you have come to trust during your research.

When you have agreed to the terms of service and clicked the Next button, you get a chance to test your brand new search engine. If the results are not to your liking, go back to the previous step (using the back button in your browser) and ajust the two main points described above. When it works to your satisfaction, click Finish.

You can now go to the control panel to work out the look and feel of your search engine and get the code to embed it on your site. If you have the time and interest, I recommend you take a look and explore the tools Google offers for your search engine, like statistics, monetization and more.

What about Yahoo and Live?

Yahoo used to have a tool — Yahoo Search Builder — which was recently shut down. Live Search Macros have one big disadvantage: You can’t embed them on your blog or site. This is such a serious drawback that I hesitate to recommend the service. Why does so many Windows products have flaws like this? Still, here’s how you proceed, should you decide to give it a go anyway:

Live Search Macros offers a simple and an advanced way to build your own search engine. The simple option lets you add a list of domains to search within. The advanced one has 26 operators you can choose from to build the perfect custom made search engine.

If this sounds complicated, don’t worry, but follow these easy steps: Log on using your Windows Live ID, click Get started and choose the simple or the advanced option.

If you choose the simple option, add the URLs of the domains you want to search. That’s it! Now you can test your brand new custom search engine by typing a test query in the appropriate box in the lower right corner of the browser window or simply save it. If this is your first search macro, you are asked to add an ID which will appear in the URL of all your macros. You also get to name this specific macro if you choose to customize the search page.

If you go for an advanced search engine, you have more choices, but the procedure is basically the same: Start by choosing which site(s) to search using the “site” operator, e.g. site:pandia.com. Then the other operators lets you exclude results containing certain phrases, search pages in specific languages and a number of other choices. Click on each of the 26 operators and a short description appears to help you choose the ones you want. Play around with this until the test search performs to your liking.