Your Custom Search Engine: Google co-op

Google has unveiled yet another interesting tool from their labs, its called Google co-op (also known as custom search engine or CSE). The tool finally caters to the needs of those who waited long enough to offer search facility on their websites.

I gave it a try on my website PHPCatalyst, and it works like charm. Very easy to setup and full of features. I haven’t fully explored it yet but I loved the ease with which I could build my customized engine in minutes.

The main features I liked about Google co-op custom search are:

It’s your own - It can be customized from a control panel to include only a few (or just your own) websites to consider for searching. You can stop worrying about results from your competitor’s website. The search box can be placed anywhere in your website and can be further customized. You can change the order of websites that it will search to produce the results in your site. For example, your website can be prioritized to be searched before other website in the list. Doing this will show results from your website before the results from other websites.

Results in your site - Yes, the results can be shows in a pre-configured page on your website. This aspect can be controlled from the control panel and all you have to do is mention a landing page in your site for search results to appear.

Look and feel - The look and feel of the results page can be customized to suite your website’s design, layout and colors.

Grow it - You can invite people or share it with the world to include websites in your search engine. Yes, there is a public URL that you get after configuring your custom search engine which you can share with your friends and others. However, the URL is not user friendly and I don’t expect any one to remember the entire URL. You may have to create a shortcut on your site which will point towards your Google hosted search engine. That will be easy to do. Let me give you an idea! You can build your own custom search engine which will be dedicated to a topic of your interest. Let’ say music. How’s that? Then you can open it to public and people with similar interests will add websites related to music to your search engine!

Make money - You can use Google’s AdSense program and make money from the results page. The Ads are displayed just like they are on Google’s main search page. You can customize the position of Ads on the results page. All this from the control panel itself. If you do not have an Google AdSense account yet, go for one.

Give Google co-op a try and I am sure you will love it!