Custom Search Engines With Google Co-op

Yet another freebee from our favorite Web super-conglomerate. The new Google Co-op Custom Search Engine looks to be quite promising for those looking to gain some control over what users are searching for.  As usual with Google’s best products, the general idea is pretty simple. In this case, create a search tool that only searches a specific set of domains. Search results may be customized to work within an existing site structure. AdSense is built in for a little extra cash incentive. More advanced features include Markers for tagging information, URL patterns for greater precision of site content, and user collaboration.

The collaboration feature is pretty cool. If turned on, visitors can add URLs to the list of search domains making it useful on community driven systems such as wikipedia.org

I took it for a test drive today. Within a few minutes, I was surfing the Web in my own restricted set of domains. In my experiment, I created a Sundog Portfolio and included a few of our clients’ websites. Google provides a number of examples that are more extensive and complete then my small test, but one get’s the idea.

Site architects might include this new service in system designs for aggregating various organizations like the portfolio example. Other obvious uses come to mind:

• Searching within specific internal knowledge bases,
• Mining code snippets and examples (with annotations) from multiple domains,
• Financial performance monitoring sites such as Google Finance,
• Aggregated music or videos,
• collaboration sites,
• etc.

Although developers can develop much of this same functionality, integrating Google saves time and provides additional benefits. Of course one has to live with the now familiar Google advertisements on search results (unless for a 501(c)(3) non-profit, university, or government agency website).