Yahoo! Has launched what it calls a search builder. It lets you build a specialized search engine tailored to your interests, your business, your web site etc.

This is done in four easy steps: Define your search engine, design the search box, brand the search results and add it to your site. Here at Pandia we tested it this morning and it took us all of 20 minutes.

Here is how it works

First you choose which kinds of search you want in the Yahoo! Search Builder. The standard is regular Yahoo! web search, but you can add site search for a particular domain and also news search from Yahoo!

The web search and news search options can be customized – this is the main point of a specialized search engine.

For the web search you tell Yahoo! which sites you want to be included in topic searches.

Remember that you need to enter one site per line, in quotation marks. At this stage you can preview web search results.

Give it a try! This way you also see if you have filled in the form correctly.

Search box

Next you get to customize your search box. You can choose the size and the colors of the box and you can include a tag cloud if you like. You also customize the search results page, where you can add a text and a logo.

You are then provided with a piece of code that you can paste into your web site. The whole process of setting it up requires no HTML knowledge and the pasting part should not be much of a challenge for your average web site owner.

The main problem

The main problem with Yahoo’s solution is that you are not able to restrict searches to sites of your choice. It will give priority to the sites listed by you, but it may also include web pages from other sites in the results.

This causes all kinds of spammy web pages to be included of no relevance to the topic of your site.

For instance: We selected a number of search engine oriented sites to be included in our version of the service. In spite of this the results for a search for “search engine optimization” brings up results from porn sites.

You may include a list of words you want to exclude from results, but that’s a lot of work, and you may accidentally exclude results from legitimate topic searchers (for instance: “search engine spam and the porn industry”).

It would be better if Yahoo! gave three options: “Topic Search”, restricted to your own selection of sites, “Site Search”, in this case limiting results to Pandia, and “Regular Web Search”, including all sites in the Yahoo! database.

Why specialized search

The new search builder service from Yahoo! is quite similar to services provided by Rollyo and Eurexter.

So every Tom, Dick and Harriet with a web site or a blog have a choice of free and easy to use services to set up their own search engine.

Why is there a market for this and is it good news for web searchers out there?

Specialized search is a necessity. The web has grown to become such a jungle that it is hard to navigate without a guide. Specialized, vertical, search engines can be such guides.

Enthusiasts and specialists of all kinds can use their special knowledge to set up such search engines – maps to the parts of the web they know best.

This is why we have hopes that services like Yahoo’s search builder will make web searching easier and more fun. On the flip side, you have to look out for dilettantes. But that is true of all searching and research.

What about Google?

Note that Google does not supply such as service as yet. However, if you sign up for a Google AdSense account, you may design your own version of the Google search engine, text ads generating revenue for you and Google included.

You can adjust the search engine algorithm of this search engine, boosting the ranking of web pages relevant to the topic of your site.

You can also put up an alternative to this adjusted web search, that restricts searches to one to three sites of your choice. Normally this feature will be used to generate a site search engine.

Pandia is testing specialized search engines:

Our “Search engine search engine” on the SE detective page is powered by Gigablast.
Susanne’s Rollyo
Our Swicky from Eurexter
Pandia’s Yahoo! search engine
Pandia’s Google site search engine

See also: Yahoo! Search Blog: Announcing Yahoo! Search Builder

Update of August 17 2006

The Yahoo! Blog has given the following response to our review. Thank you!

Pandia Team,
Thanks for the review of Yahoo! Search Builder. Regarding the point that Search Builder does not allow one to restrict the search to specific sites there is an issue with this that is currently being addressed. Basically, when entering the URLs that you want to restrict your search to it should not include quotes around the URL; the supporting text was a bit misleading and this issue has been addressed. Furthermore, one does not need to include the URL prefix and can simply enter yahoo.com. For a more detailed response with screen shots please see our earlier response to Nathan.
Let us know if this solved the issues you encountered.

Thanks,
The Yahoo! Search Builder Team
Posted by: Ariel Seidman at August 10, 2006 01:21 PM