» Make your own search engine with Google Custom Search

Make your own search engine with Google Custom Search

Pandia adds vertical search engine for searching search oriented sites. Read more about the new Google Custom Search tool.

It took some time, but Google has finally added a tool for developing your own, customized, vertical search engine.

A customized vertical search engine is used for fine tuning search results towards high quality sites that represents expertise in one particular topic. This can be done in two ways:

You restrict search engines results to a limited number of sites covering the same topic. In Pandia’s case that would be sites covering search engines, web searching and search engine marketing.
You develop a list of “trusted sites” that should be given priority in search results, but you also allow for results from other sites to the degree they are relevant. These additional results are generated by the search engine from the regular search engine database in the traditional way. In Google’s case this means that you get Google results based on a new algorithm that boosts sites of your choosing.

For site owners this is a way of adding a “sticky tool” that hopefully will bring visitors back for more.

For the search engine providing this service this is

a way of getting new searchers,
a new venue for presenting text ads,
a source of new data that can be used to pinpoint authority sites; data that can be used to improve regular search results as well.

The competition

There are already several such tools available. Pandia has tested many of them. See for instance:

Pandia’s Search Engine Topic Search, powered by Gigablast Custom Topic Search
Susanne’s Search Engine News Rollyo , powered by Rollyo
Pandia’s Search Engine News Swicki , powered by Eurekster

The other big search engines have similar services:

And there are other options:

Google has a winner

So, we can safely conclude that in this area Google is not the innovator. This does not mean that Google cannot win this market, though. Google is the mastodon of search, and may win through its weight and influence alone — even if there are better solutions out there.

In this case, however, we can conclude that Google may win for another reason: They have developed a very good package, indeed.

It is the combination of features that make Google Co-op Custom Search Engine a winner:

You can choose whether you want to let the new search engine search your list of sites only, or add results from the regular Google database as well.
You may also define sites that are to be excluded from results.
You may add so-called refinement labels. These are links to alternative search results that are restricted to a particular sub-set of web sites or topics.
You can host both a search box and the search results on your website, meaning that the search results will appear in an iframe on one of your own pages. This gives you full control of the lay out.
Google will add advertising to cover their costs. However, if you have — or establish — an Adsense account, you will get part of the income. Non-profit organizations, universities or government agencies can develop search engines without ads.
You may add keyword phrases to help Google understand what your search engine is about.
You may let other people whose expertise you trust contribute to your Custom Search Engine.
There is no limit to the number sites that can be included in your list of favorites.
There is a bookmarklet (Google Marker ) you can use to add sites you find to your search engine with one click.

Pandia’s Search in Search search engine

We have taken Google Co-op for a test drive, and developed our own custom made search engine called Search in Search. The idea is to give our readers a vertical search engine that gives priority to what we consider the best search oriented sites around.

So far we have chosen the easy way, and adjusted the simple design hosted by Google. We have included some 50 sites in the default selection (listed below) and asked Google to add additional sites when relevant.

However, by using the label function we have also given you the option of:

Searching Pandia alone (click on Refine results to Pandia only)
Searching the selected sites alone, without additional search results from other sites (click on Refine results to Search oriented sites)
Searching the sites that cover search topics of interest to librarians, searchers and researchers in particular (with additional results from other sites) (click on Refine results to Library and research)
Searching search engine marketing oriented sites (with additional results from other sites) (click on Refine results to Search engine marketing)

And to make the service easily available we have added the search form to our gateway for search oriented sites, blogs and forums — the Pandia Search Engine Detective.

Does it work? Oh yes!

We decided to use it to identify blogs and sites that had covered the Google Custom Search Engine for our “Further Reading” list below, and a search for “Google custom search” gave us all the important posts in one go. The regular Google search engine doesn’t even come close to this.