Recently, Google has received a lot of criticism for the degradation in the quality of its search results. A lot of times the web pages that appear on the first page of Google are not relevant to your search query. That being said, Google is still the best way to search online. However, if you are someone whose searches are usually limited to one or a few niches and you can’t seem to find meaningful information through a regular Google search and you instead go directly to your favorite websites, then you might consider creating your own custom search engine using Google CSE.
This helps you create a search engine that contains only your favorite collection of trusted websites, and so you get clean and reliable results every time you search for something. This service is free to use without any limitation of any kind and comes with advantages such as:
- CSE allows specific domains to be added, so add your favorite sites to it and limit your search to just “quality” sites.
- Get rid of spam and “personal search suggestions” with ease.
- Add your friends to contribute and use the custom search engine. Here, “contributing” means that invited users can add more domains to the search engine.
Here on Guiding Tech if you search for anything using the search box on the top right of the page you will see all specific results from Guiding Tech and that’s because we are using CSE which is limited to only one domain here.
Steps to Create a Custom Search Engine Using CSE
Step 1: To get started, first sign in at Google and open Google Custom Search. On the home page, click the blue button that says Create a Custom Search Engine.
Step 2: You will now see a three-step wizard to guide you through the entire creation process. The first step is all about the search description and the sites you want to limit the search to. Once you’ve covered the necessary details, agree to the TOS (reading or ignoring it entirely is up to you) and move on to the next step.
Note: Google offers two versions of custom search, Standard Edition and Site Search, their details are as follows.
The standard version gives you a tailored search experience using Google technology. You can also customize the look and feel of the search engine and integrate it into your website using iframes. You must show ads next to search results, unless you’re creating a search engine for a nonprofit, university, or government agency, in which case you can disable ads. You can monetize these ads with the AdSense for Search program.
Site Search starts at $100 per year and comes with additional options. You get guaranteed support and better resulting customization options through the XML API. Ads are not displayed next to search results.
Step 3: Actually, creating your custom search engine is done in the step above. This step is like a playground to check if the content is working as expected. Just choose the theme you like and test drive your custom search engine. If everything looks perfect, move on to the next step, but if you don’t get the results you expect, you can always go back to a step and make changes.
Step 4: Finally, you will get a custom Search element code that you can paste as HTML on your blog. You can also change the look and feel of the search engine before integrating it into your site. For those without a blog or forum, you can access your Custom Search Engine right from Google. You can go to the Google CSE admin page and select the search engine you created and start searching. You can also bookmark it for later reference.
You can create multiple CSEs and maintain them all from the admin panel. If you own a website and are an AdSense publisher, you can sign up to make money with Google AdSense.
Conclusion
One caveat to the personalized search engine creation process provided by Google above is that you need to know the names of the sites to include. For someone like me who subscribes to a large number of websites in Google Reader, it’s not difficult. But if you want to create a CSE in a niche that you haven’t explored yet then you need to invest time first trying to exploit the best sources of content that you will eventually create a search engine.
Rest assured, it’s a pretty cool way to effectively and efficiently search the World Wide Web (or a small part of it).
Categories: How to
Source: thpttranhungdao.edu.vn/en/
