Google custom search review
Tags: google – google custom search – site search – online publishing – google base
If you want to provide search functionality on your website (a must), the choices are limited for publishers. Even worse, they do a terrible job. For instance, this search engine returns results but they are not always relevant. Your next best bet is to use Google Site Search, which is simple to implement, is free, and even allows you to monetize your search traffic, if the visitor chooses to click on a sponsored ad rather than your content. The main problem is that Google serves the results from its main index, which may not include every single page from your website. Another limitation was that Google let you search from only three domain names, so if you operated more than three websites, as most online publishers do, you had no luck.
Google now has another offering that allows you to create your own search engine. In other words, you can add many more domains to search and since the engine is administered from a central location, you can add/delete domains with a few clicks. Unlike Google base which was a disappointment for content companies, this offering from Google Co-Op is excellent. We have designed our very own search engine (snapshot above) and it works fairly well because we can now let our visitors access content from our multiple properties – that means more traffic and income. The old problem of Google not indexing all the pages and not showing what are known as “supplemental” pages is still there. While I understand why Google wouldn’t be able to serve pages that it chooses not to index, I have a hard time understanding why it does not serve the “supplemental” pages – they are sometimes more relevant than Google’s algorithm thinks, are already in the index, and stop our readers from making the determination on what pages to look at.
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