Toluu

Custom Search Engine blog

Updates and tips from the Google Custom Search team.

Knol - now with Custom SearchOctober 30 2008

Posted by: Cedric Dupont, Product Manager

Knol is a project aimed at helping people share their knowledge. Knols (units of knowledge) are authoritative articles written by people about a specific subject, ranging from tooth pain to solar energy to buttermilk pancakes. With all of these knols to browse, our readers have been begging us for a more powerful search tool. Well, today we have good news - we've added the power of Custom Search to Knol.

Custom Search gives us all of the speed and relevance of Google's search technology, but required none of the hard labor that went into making Google search what it is today. With Custom Search, Knol visitors will have a fast search experience that features all of the bells and whistles Google searchers have come to love (including our advanced spell checker). When you search within Knol, the search results look a little different from Web Search results (see this

Beefed-up developer guideSeptember 18 2008

Posted by: Kevin Gargoyle Lim, Technical Writer

We've updated the developer guide to include the more advanced Custom Search features, such as synonym expansion and integration with Subscribed Links. These features let you trick out your search engine and give your users a richer search experience. Synonym expansion lets you expand a user's search term (such as "running") to include its variants (such as "jogging" and "sprinting"), so users will not need to search for each variant. Subscribed Links enables you to directly answer your users' questions by promoting a specific result at the top of the results page. You can create your own result text and define sets of queries that would trigger subscribed link results.

The developer guide may not be edge-of-your-seat material, but it does now come with a freebie

Delivering Custom Search to your applicationsSeptember 10 2008

Posted by: Mark Lucovsky, Software Engineer

One of the most exciting things happening with our APIs is the clever use of Custom Search engines (CSEs), blended results, and innovative uses of UI components, resulting in rich user experiences. I'd like to highlight a few interesting applications that use the AJAX API with Custom Search, and then illustrate how Custom Search engines are accessed in the AJAX Search API. With a little effort, it is possible to get a very different search experience than the standard iframe version of CSE results to embed into your web site.

Over the last couple of weeks, users found interesting information about the U.S. elections and the party conventions at our 2008 U.S. Election page. In the center of the page, there's a page element based on the AJAX API that is designed to deliver a large amount of very specific election-related news and information in a very compact form factor. The tab labeled "Blog Posts" is simply a search on a specific CSE -- the CSE itself is simple, it covers a dozen or so well-read political blogs. This page element demonstrates the ability to deliver this in a very small form factor that's easy to place on any page. You can do a "view source" on the page and you will see what I mean. The AJAX Search API blog provid

Creative uses of Custom SearchAugust 19 2008

Posted by: Rajat Mukherjee, Group Product Manager and John Skidgel, Senior Interaction Designer

If you've been to the 2008 Summer Games site that we created to help you stay updated on the happenings in Beijing this month, you'll notice a Custom Search box in the upper right corner that will offer you results from a set of sites that cover the games. This customized search experience is similar to what many of our users have been doing with Custom Search - defining their own slice of the web to search.


Since we launched Custom Search, developers have found interesting ways to use the platform and the API (did you see our new developer guide?). One of the interesting ways to build a customized search experience is by using linked Custom Search Engines (CSEs). With linked CSEs, you can create a dynamically defined search engine that can be updated automatically.

A cool application to create a person

Spanking new developer guideJune 12 2008

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!