Using Google’s Custom Search Engine for Internal Site Search

More and more each day you probably see Google’s custom search engine functionality appear on site’s across the Internet. In fact, I have implemented the Google custom search engine on two of my own sites. If you are looking for a simple way to enhance your users’ engagement level on your site then I recommend you take a closer look at Google custom search engine. Below are few of the top reasons I like it so much:
  • Giving users what they are used to: More than half the world prefers Google’s search results and are comfortable interacting with the search box as well as the search results. Google Custom search engine provides the exact same search experience as Google.com but on YOUR site.
     
  • Building your own search engine is difficult: Have you ever tried designing your own site search functionality, it’s definitely not simple. It’s difficult to apply the same type of algorithms Google does so that you can sort your results smarter than just alphabetically. With the custom search engine the algorithms are applied for you and you gain all the benefits of the awesome performance.
     
  • Access to deeper content: Many sites on the Internet have some of their best content buried deep within their folder structure, the custom search engine allows your users to find that deep content within 1 click without getting frustrated and abandoning your site.
     
  • Access to new content, not a huge issue anymore: One previous draw back of Google Custom Search vs. a proprietary search was that Google took a little while longer to index newer content which made a given site’s internal search results not as fresh. However, with the recent changes, your new content can be made available quicker by leveraging Google’s XML sitemaps.
     
  • Customization: Google Custom Search Engine allows you to customize your configuration in many different ways including: look and feel of results, style of search box, placement of ads, sites to search within, ability to introduce AdSense, method of displaying results and refinement labels for popular website topics.

Original Post: Web Analytics World

7 Comments to “Using Google’s Custom Search Engine for Internal Site Search”

  1. Richard Okwesa 27 May 2008 at 9:48 am #

    Hi Manoj,

    This is a very interesting article and I’m going to explore this solution for us.

    Thanks
    Richard

  2. admin 27 May 2008 at 9:51 am #

    Thanks Richard – I think it’s definitely worth trying and it works best for a company who has a decent amount of their pages indexed in Google.

  3. matt 29 May 2008 at 5:55 am #

    we have used the google cse instead of our internal search engine for some time now. it works great.

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  6. james 19 December 2008 at 2:30 am #

    thanks manoj for this information its comes out with very good result for me to use Google search engine for internal search for my site

  7. Gaurav 30 March 2009 at 8:12 am #

    Excellent article. I’d like to bring up a problem in hope to resolve it. I’ve attained the business edition. The use of the search engine is meant to be an internal one primarily. If user types carbon monoxide, they should ideally get all documents in our site that mention ‘carbon monoxide’. The scenario should ideally be the same for ‘Health and Wellness’, ‘Homework Help’, etc.

    Issue 1: When I search (for example: ‘carbon monoxide’), I get some results, but not all. There’s a pdf that contains that result, and there’s also another page that isn’t included in the results. This is the case with many other search queries.

    Issue 2: When I change the contents of a page. For example, I created a test page, that started showing up in the search results. Afterwards, I changed all the content, title, and meta tags of that page to be completely different. But, it still continues to show up.

    This is a great tool, and thumbs up to google for making it happen. I do hope to get some further insight into the above issues so that my users can utilize the search functionality efficiently.

    Thank you.