October 27, 2009

Google Custom Search Celebrates Birthday with Updates Galore

Google is celebrating the third birthday of Custom Search with many updates. Here they are:

Custom Search Themes - Now you can customize the look of Custom Search on your site with themes, which can be tweaked for color, font, background and feature adjustments.

Custom Search Skin on Wikipedia - On the flip side, you can contextualize your Wikipedia experience with a Custom Search skin. When enabled, the Custom Search skin provides Google contextualized search throughout Wikipedia. Learn more about the Custom Search skin for Wikipedia here.

Structured Custom Search - Going back to Custom Search for your site, there are three new structured custom search updates. You can add Thumbnails and Actions to the Custom Search Elements, which allows metadata markups. You can also now restrict search results using metadata attributes. And there's a new Rich Snippets Preview tool.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 2:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 23, 2009

7 Google Updates: Custom Search, AdWords API, Maps, Search Appliance and More

Google had another busy week pushing out updates. That's really no surprise considering Apple released product refreshes and Microsoft released Windows 7. Google hasn't let any major update from any competitor go by without their own news and this week was no different.

We've already covered Google getting a deal with Twitter (similar to Bing's deal with Twitter) as well as a new social search experiment set up in Google Labs.

Here are 7 updates that are slightly minor but you'll still want to know about:

Custom Search is now available for mobile search experiences on smartphone and higher-end devices. Google will even host your mobile-optimized custom search pages for you, or you can host it on your mobile site.

AdWords API has a new version that includes asynchronous calls, keyword and placement ideas, and a location extensions preview.

Google Maps for Mobile has introduced layers for Blackberry users.

Google Search Appliance, an enterprise search server, released an update that includes a Self-Learning Scorer.

Google Friend Connect has a new Wordpress plugin.

Webmaster Central has new instructions for verifying a Blogger blog in Webmaster Tools.

Google Reader added Popular Items and Personalized Ranking features.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 12:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

October 9, 2009

Custom Search Now Available for Google Sites

If you use Google Sites to publish websites, you now have Google Custom Search as an option for your site. Here's the steps you need to follow:

Login to your Google Site
Click the "More Actions" dropdown menu, then select "Manage Site"
On the lefthand Navigation menu, choose "Site Layout." Click "Configure Search"
In the "Configure site search" section, click the "Advanced" tab. Then, click the "Add provider" button.
Login to the Custom Search control panel in another tab or window.
Copy the URL for the search engine you want to use. Paste it back in the Add Provider section in step number 4. Name the search option, leave the Show Results option checked.
Click OK.
Change your default provider in the "General" tab under the "Configure site search" dialog and selecting your new setup.
Save.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 6:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

June 19, 2009

7 Google Updates Including Flash Indexing, Custom Search, and AdSense

Another week, another slew of Google Updates. Chew on these new features while you watch the US Open this weekend:

Google Flash Indexing - The googlebot will now index external content sources used in SWF files.

Google Webmaster Central - Reconsideration requests now come with notifications so you'll know where you're at in the process.

Custom Search Automatic Transilteration - You can type in one language but see results in another.

Google AdSense - Change the font size for your ad display units.

Google Maps and Transit - 7 new agencies have been added including

Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County, Houston, TX
VIA Metropolitan Transit in San Antonio, TX
Utah Transit Authority, Salt Lake City, UT
Metro St. Louis, St Louis, MO
Foothill Transit, San Gabriel Valley, CA
Riverside Transit, Riverside, CA
Charlotte Area Transit System, Charlotte, NC
Pinella Suncoast Transit Authority, St. Petersburg, FL

Google Book Search - Got a makeover, including embedded links, book search within each book, thumbnail view, content drop-down menu, plain text mode, page turn button and animation, and an updated book overview page.

A microblogging search engine may be coming soon to Google, according to the unofficial Google Operating System blog. This would compete with Twitter search as well as Facebook's new search tests.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 4:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 19, 2009

Is Google's New Preference Option Building Trust Ranking?

The introduction of Google's latest search feature "Preferences" where you get to add sites whose results you prefer to be a source of your search results seems to reflect their move to "Trust" ranking.

"The preferred sites feature lets you set your Google Web Search preferences so that your search results match your unique tastes and needs. Fill in the sites you rely on the most, and results from your preferred sites will show up more often when they're relevant to your search query," Google explains.

You can add and remove sites you do or don't want factored into what you are looking for. Sounds like you are giving Google solid information to move from a link based algorithm to a 'trust based' one. How things change in the future could be interesting.

Factor in William Flaiz's recent article about the relevancy of rankings and the idea is not a stretch.

Posted by Frank Watson at 2:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

November 13, 2008

Google Site Search Offers On Demand Indexing

Google announced early this morning that they have updated their Site Search product to provide for on demand indexing of your site. What this means is that if you are using Google's Site Search feature to provide visitors to your web site with a tool to search your site, you can always keep that on site search tool up to date. It is important to note that this new tool does NOT provide on demand indexing for your site in Google's general index.

Nonetheless, this is a very cool tool, so let's walk through a quick scenario. Imagine that you have a site where you have added a substantial amount of new content. Perhaps you have added 100 pages of new articles and data to the site. Prior to this announcement, you would have had to wait for the Googlebot to come along and find those changes, and for them to be incorporated in the index before your Site Search would be able to search on that new content.

Now, with today's announcement, you can go into the configuration screen for your Site Search, request on demand indexing, and a fresh crawl will be done of your entire site. This data is then made available to users who use Site Search on your site, in real time.

This is a really neat enhancement, ensuring that you can always offer users a full and robust search function on your site, even immediately after you have made massive changes.

Last night I spoke with Nitin Mangtani, the lead product manager for Google Enterprise Search, and he indicated that the new functionality would not be possible without Google's cloud computing architecture. Basically, the index for your Site Search is unique in nature.

If there was only one copy of that index (perhaps on a Google server near your web site's hosting location), people all over the world would have to access that server (causing potentially large latencies) to get the data from that index. The cloud computing architecture used by Google results in your unique index being distributed across the globe, and eliminates those latencies.

Posted by at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

June 12, 2008

Google Custom Search Creates New Developer Guide

Google Custom Search has created a new developer guide, which is now available at the Google Code site. The guide was built from scratch with a new organization, search box, and navigation. There's also more pictures to break up an otherwise monotonous document (what's useful isn't always what's exciting).

The new developer guide also digs into background information and complex information as well as makes suggestions to help you on your way.

With the new guide, users can now search across multiple APIs. Google Custom Search fuels the search on the Google Code website.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 9:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

June 3, 2008

Google Rebrands, Enhances Google Site Search

Google has announced today some nice enhancements to their Site Search solution. Originally announced as Custom Search Business Edition, this product has now been rebranded as Google Site Search. The focus on site search solutions for web sites has been huge, with thousands of sites using it. In addition to the rebranding of the solution there are four product enhancements that Google is announcing:

Synonym support - Google Site Search allows you to specify a custom list of synonyms. For example, if you are General Electric, you might want to let the search engine know that "GE" = General Electric. This is something that allows publishers using Google Site Search to notify the search engines of synonyms that Google Web Search does not know about.
Date Biasing - With date biasing a publisher can tell Google Site Search to place great emphasis on "recency" than it would otherwise do. Publishers can specify Low, Medium, or High, where high is essentially a directive to base the results on recency as the most significant factor.
Top Results Biasing - With top results biasing, a publisher can place great emphasis on a certain section of their site. For example, a site with a lot of different sections, including forums for example, might want to specify a higher priority for the product pages of the site to make them more likely to show up.
Improved Indexing - This allows publishers to include in their site search pages from their site that Google knows about (i.e Google has crawled these pages), but for one reason or another does not include them in their web search index. Of course, with a site map file you can use this mechanism to make sure that your Google Site Search includes every page from your site.

I spoke earlier this evening with Nitin Mangtani, the Lead Product Manager for Google Enterprise Search. He provide me with some examples of how people were using Google Site Search today. For Example, EMC implemented Google Site Search on http://EMCInsignia.com, a site that previously had no site search solution.

The results were outstanding. EMC experienced a 20% increase in e-commerce sales on the site, and an 85% reduction in customer returns. In addition, by the end of the first week, 10% of site visitors were using site search.

Nitin also was duty bound to emphasize that implementing the new Google Site Search, including the enhanced features, would have no impact on Google's web search results. That said, this represents a nice set of incremental improvements to an already solid product.

Posted by at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

April 29, 2008

Google Custom Search Offers Creative Commons Labels

The Google Custom Search team has announced the addition of four labels to enhance searches for Creative Commons content. The four labels are:

* free_use_share (by-nc-nd) * free_use_share_commercially (by-nd) * free_use_share_modify (by-nc-sa) * free_use_share_modify_commercially (by-sa)

These labels can be used to restrict all custom search content to Creative Commons results or to help refine searches. The CC labels are filter labels.

Google also took the opportunity to remind us of how to document Creative Commons license. They gave four examples of the many ways licenses can be documented on an HTML file:

1. with ... in the HTML head or body 2. using 3. using 4. using ... in a comment

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 9:22 AM | Permalink

April 23, 2008

Google Says ‘No' to Ecocho

Last week, we reported the launch of Ecocho, a custom search engine that promises to plant up to 2 trees for every 1,000 searches. Users could choose to search either Yahoo or Google in their quest to help the planet.

But just one day after Earth Day, word has come that Google isn't so cool with Ecocho's modus operandi. It seems the mission of the green-minded site doesn't jibe with Google's Adsense policy, which prohibits the compensation of third parties through the promise of performed searches.

Searchers can still embark on “green” searches using Yahoo via Ecocho, and now there's even a “black version,” meaning it displays a dark background (and not a niche search site for African-Americans), which some think uses less energy.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 11:37 AM | Permalink

January 20, 2008

Blackle Is the New Google, Plus Greener Gadgets

Blackle is the new Green Google. Last year ecoIron blog reported Google would save mega megawatts by converting its famous whitespace to a black background. With the advent of Google Custom Search Engine, Mark Ontkush's brilliant idea became a reality. Blackle was born.

Joining the black is the new green search revolution: Blackoogle.

Core77 design network blogger Jeannie Chloe named Heap Media's Blackle one of the industrial design highlights of the year. Now Core77 is teaming up with Greener Gadgets to hold the Greener Gadgets competition (enter here by Jan 27, 2008) culminating in the Greener Gadgets conference on February 1st in NYC.

You can read more about Blackle and Blackoogle on some great blogs here, here, and here.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 12:01 AM | Permalink

December 5, 2007

SEW Experts: Always Rank No. 1 in Google: Custom Search

Implementing a Custom Search Engine won't change your organic search engine rankings. It will give you the flexibility to make your listing the top result on every SERP when visitors conduct a search from your site. In today's By the Numbers column, "Always Rank No. 1 in Google: Custom Search," Eric Enge shows you how, with a basic level of programming effort, you can get those search results and substantially customize the look and feel of the results.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

November 20, 2007

Google Custom Search Engines Go International

Google has expanded its Custom Search Engine program internationally. Now it's available in 40 languages, and in close to 80 countries worldwide. The Custom Search Business Edition (CSBE), which provides users with complete control over their look and feel, and does not show any ads in the results, is also being made available in those same languages and countries. Unlike the free edition of Custom Search Engines, CSBEs come with a fee. Another benefit of CSBEs is that you can get email support, which is not available in the free edition.

Yesterday I spoke with Nitin Mangtani, lead product manager of enterprise search at Google, and he told me that Google has found the predominant use of Custom Search Business Edition is as a tool to implement site search. Correspondingly, Google plans to setup a web page just for site search applications, though this page is not currently implemented. This should make the setup and management of site search versions of Custom Search Engines easier to manage and deploy.

Posted by at 8:25 AM | Permalink

November 1, 2007

Google Custom Search Overlay

The Google Custom Search blog just announced a new feature, the Custom Search Results Overlay. What it does is provide a way to have the results of a user's search overlay itself on top of the screen containing the search box. You can see an example of this here.

It's an interesting idea. A bit like a pop-up concept, except it avoids the issues inherent with pop-up blocking. The overlay lets you provide search functionality to your users without losing their focus on your web site. So now you get to provide a better site experience for your users, and you don't have to feel like you are actively driving them away from your web site.

Posted by at 6:32 AM | Permalink

September 21, 2007

Custom Search Business Edition

Google has created a new version of its Custom Search Engines which it calls Custom Search Business Edition. This version offers business owners the option to turn off the ads, and complete customization of the way the search results are presented. The result is that they can create a truly customized experience for the user.

Of course, obtaining this additional capability comes at a price. The pricing model offered by Google is as follows:

Search less than 5,000 web pages: $100 per year
Search less than 50,000 web pages: $500 per year
Search less than 100,000 web pages: $850 per year
Search less than 300,000 web pages: $2250 per year

The customization of the look and feel of the search results is enabled because the results are made accessible through an XML API. This enables you to control the look and feel of the presentation. Ultimately, this new product provides web site owners with additional flexibility in using Custom Search Engines on their sites.

Posted by at 9:55 AM | Permalink

September 20, 2007

Google Launching New Custom Business Search Engine

The new business edition of custom search comes with a sliding scale price tag, the Google site details. According to the site, Custom Search Business Edition is available in a number of plans:

Search less than 5,000 web pages: $100 per year Search less than 50,000 web pages: $500 per year Search less than 100,000 web pages: $850 per year Search less than 300,000 web pages: $2250 per year

Posted by Frank Watson at 2:59 PM | Permalink

September 17, 2007

Set the Context in your Custom Search Engine

Last week the Google Custom Search blog posted about a couple of Custom Search Engine updates. One of these is a change I have been asking about for a long time, and it's great to see it.

Now the keywords that you program in the Basics tab of the control panel have a stronger effect on results. In a sense, they allow you to assume a context. Here is the example they provided in their post:

Compare the results on this yoga search engine when looking for a "mat" with and without the keyword "yoga" -- with keywords: http://www.google.com/cse?q=mat&cx=005239880967462049052%3A412vkh_dcla

without keywords: http://www.google.com/cse?q=mat&cx=005239880967462049052:mdwcyik6y9m

The reason that this is a really important change is that users get set in the context of the site. When they are on a yoga site using a yoga search engine, they don't expect that they will have to type in "yoga mat". The data I have seen shows that they want to type in "mat".

Every time you force a user to redo something because of a mismatch between their expectations and what you provide, some of them lose interest in going further and leave. This is not a good thing, but now you can address it with Google Custom Search Engines.

Posted by at 10:56 AM | Permalink

July 17, 2007

Google to Offer Hosted Custom Site Search for Businesses

Google has launched a program offering small businesses hosted site search with its Google Custom Search Business Edition, an enhanced version of its Custom Search Engine (CSE) service launched last fall.

The Business Edition allows site owners to turn off AdWords ads that normally appear in free CSE search results. Site owners can also create a custom user interface and import search results via an XML feed, and Google branding is optional. It also comes with dedicated e-mail and phone support.

Custom Search Business Edition starts at $100 a year for searching up to 5,000 pages, and extends to $500/year for up to 50,000 pages.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 10:45 AM | Permalink

April 30, 2007

Google Helping State Government Sites Get Indexed

Google has teamed up with four state governments – Arizona, California, Utah and Virginia – to make public information on their Web sites more searchable. The four states have made their public databases more accessible to Google's crawler by using sitemaps to identify the structure of their sites. They have also used Google's Custom Search Engine service to include the Web sites of various state agencies in a site search.

"Connecting citizens with their government by offering the public better access to public sector information and services is consistent with our broader vision – to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," Eric Schmidt, Google's chairman and CEO, said in a statement. "These partnerships are among many that Google is pursuing with government agencies to better serve the public."

Google has a page on its site dedicated to helping public sector groups to use Google services.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:09 AM | Permalink

April 13, 2007

An Interview with a Google Custom Search Engineer

Over at his Stone Temple Consulting site, Eric Enge has published an interview with Google's Rajat Mukherjee, project lead for the Google Custom Search Engines group.

One interesting point Mukherjee made was that more than 100,000 Custom Search Engines have been created since the service launched in October. He is also a big believer that search will become highly distributed, with search occurring at the "point of inspiration." That means search will more often occur at the web site you are on when the idea to perform a search strikes you.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 8:18 AM | Permalink

January 12, 2007

A Search Engine For Search Marketers

Lee Odden recently released a list of search marketing blogs, which he plans to update every Friday. The article has received well-deserved accolades for its nearly exhaustive collection of links related to search marketing.

The list and its accompanying OPML file has led to the creation by Alister Cameron of a Google Custom Search Engine to search specifically within the listed blogs. Ideally, this could be used by search marketers to create a well-rounded view of search expert opinions on particular subjects. To conduct a search, see Alister's post Introducing The Search Engine Marketing Search Engine or the SEM Search Page. Following is a review of a few searches conducted today, and a link to the SEW Forums thread to discuss the idea.

The first search conducted on 1/12/06 for “301 redirect” yielded the following top 5 results (descriptions omitted):

Permanent 301 Redirect - High Rankings Search Engine Optimization www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=5644

David Naylor » DaveN » 301 Redirect on page code301 Redirect. www.davidnaylor.co.uk/archives/2005/12/22/301-redirect-on-page-code/ - Similar pages

URL Redirect www.seocompany.ca/seo/url-redirect.html

301 Redirect Help! www.webmasterworld.com/forum21/11903.htm

Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO » SEO advice: url… (tsk tsk Matt Cutts for that long title) www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/

By Comparison, a regular Google search yielded the following top 5:

301 Redirect - How to create Redirects301 www.webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webpage.php

Giving search engine spiders direction - 301 redirect www.tamingthebeast.net/articles3/spiders-301-redirect.htm

How to Do a 301 Redirect www.internetbasedmoms.com/seo/301-redirect.html

How to Redirect a Web Page Using a 301 Redirect www.isitebuild.com/301-redirect.htm

301 Redirect - 301 Permanent Redirect by Brian V. Bonini www.gnc-web-creations.com/301-redirect.htm

My Score: SEM Search 1, Google Search 0 Perhaps I am biased, but the 5 top results for that particular search yielded far more answers and thought-provocation that the Google results. However, the Google results may be of more use to “regular searchers” that do not have as much skill in SEO as SEM's may have. Note also that this search only yielded one Paid result when I conducted it. (Hmm wonder how many there will be in a few days after some SEM's read this?)

The next search for “duplicate content” yielded far more Sponsored results – 4 on top and 4 more on the side. Note also if you are concerned with every impression that an ad may receive, the Paid listings are repeated on the subsequent results pages. The top 3:

Duplicate Content Issues www.seroundtable.com/archives/003398.html

» Duplicate Content - Penalize Me, Please (yes the >> is in the Page Title…nice trick) www.pandia.com/sew/169-duplicate-content.html

Duplicate Content - Get it right or perish www.webmasterworld.com/google/3060898.htm

Regular Google results:

Duplicate Content Issues www.seroundtable.com/archives/003398.html

Avoiding Duplicate Content Penalties www.elixirsystems.com/seo_tips/avoiding-duplicate-content-penalty.php

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Deftly dealing with ... (ahem perhaps Webmaster Central Blog should get shorter Titles too?) googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/12/deftly-dealing-with-duplicate-content.html

I would give this one a tie. It is probably due to the fact that the term “duplicate content” is so often used by bloggers and in forums that the top three are all SEO-related in the regular results of each of these searches. It seems interesting and also a good sign that Google's Webmaster Central Blog does not show in the top three on the SEM-search feature (they are on the list). Obviously Google is not trying to manipulate any results in favor of their own blog.

I feel very confident that I will be using the SEM search blog almost exclusively to search for SEO and Paid Search topics in the near future. Thanks for this great tool, Alister, Lee and Google – I am pretty certain that you better get ready for lots of traffic from search marketers and students interested in the subject as well. In fact, if I was to advertise, student-populated sites would probably be my first target. After all, this will probably end up getting blogged failry heavily so those in the SEM community should find out very rapidly.

Please share your thoughts on this search function at the thread at SEW Forums, Google Custom Search For Search Marketers and Search Students

Posted by Chris Boggs at 10:13 AM | Permalink

January 4, 2007

Google Search Appliance adds new features to customize enterprise search

Earlier today, Google announced some new features for the Google Search Appliance that give enterprise customers the ability to customize search results for their individual corporate environments. The Google Search Appliance now also offers improved integration with Google services as well as additional content sources.

New features of the Google Search Appliance include:

-- "Results Hit Clustering," which are groups of dynamically formed sub-categories based on the results of each search query. These clusters appear at the top of search results and help searchers refine their queries from possibly ambiguous terms. For example, if an employee searches for "customer" on the company network, a set of categories could appear at the top of the results with groups of topics such as "customer support" or "customer contacts" to help guide the search. Administrators can customize the location and appearance of Results Hit Clustering within search results.

-- "Source Biasing," which enables administrators to assign various weights to search results on their corporate network, based on source or type of content. For instance, if a company has multiple Documentum servers, the site administrator can strengthen the content from the primary Documentum server. The same is true for types of content. If a financial services corporation values content in .pdf form more than content in a word processing document, administrators can use Source Biasing to increase the weight of .pdfs in the search results. A menu-driven interface allows weak or strong increases or decreases, and requires no complex coding or scripting.

The new version of the Google Search Appliance also adds improved integration with Google Sitemaps export for simpler export of information about web pages available for crawling, as well as open source connectors for indexing content in SharePoint 2003 and SharePoint 2007.

The Google Search Appliance starts at $30,000 to search up to 500,000 documents.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 5:30 PM | Permalink

October 30, 2006

Google Interview With Shashi Seth On Custom Search Engine Product

Eric Enge of Stone Temple Consulting posted an Interview of Google's Shashi Seth. Shashi Seth is Product Lead of Search and was directly responsible for the Custom Search Engine. Eric asked Shashi questions about the new product and Google Co-op platform.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:24 AM | Permalink

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