Oct 24 / Ajay

Now create your very own Search Engine

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You can now harness the power of Google to build your very own search engine tailored to sites you want to search.

Google has just launched Custom Search Engine. All you have to do is give it a name and select which sites you want it to search from. You have the option of either searching only these sites or emphasizing the results from these sites while searching the web.

You can also embed the search engine on your website via the AdSense for Search program and make some money via the traffic that it generates.

You also have the option of letting users volunteer by submitting their list of sites to be added in the search results.

This helps if you are creating a topic specific search engine, e.g. a search engine that gathers all information about WordPress. It can help if you get visitors to suggest sites to be searched.

I’ve gone ahead and created one search engine which searches through my network of websites.

Search my CSE or create your own.

Putch / Oct 24 2006

Upon checking this out, three features stood out:
1) You can exclude sites that you do not want in the results
2) You can easily do so using the Google Marker
3) Anyone can volunteer to help

So we decided to throw up an experiment to encourage everyone to mark spam sites to be excluded from search results.

Working together as a community we may be able to radically improve the quality of the search results (or perhaps just get in a blacklisting war?)

The result is Putch – http://www.putch.com
Anand - Internet Blogger / Oct 24 2006

But weren’t most of these features been available from the Adsense program for a long time!?
Ajay / Oct 24 2006

Adsense for Search is a very different initiative.

Though certain portions were same. Stark differences are the ability to have volunteers contribute.
Also, there you could only search one site at a time, here you search through all the sites at the same time.
Alan / Oct 25 2006

Intersting to know this things….in regards to make $$$$. Is it hard to set one up
Ajay / Oct 25 2006

Alan, you will need a Google Adsense account.

Setting up the custom search engine is extremely simple.

I haven’t integrated my CSE with Adsense as of now. May do so in the near future.