Search

We often receive an enquiry whereby the owner of a SD or SDHC memory card will advise that their

Good news for Google Site Search owners who manage multiple Google Site Search engines!  You can now share query quota between paid GSS and free Custom Search engines.

This may be useful for you if you pay for a quota with Google Site Search and you’d like to share that quota with your Custom Search engines.  To do this, add those extra engines to a “business group” to share the quota.


To add CSEs to a business group, visit the Business Group page of your GSS’s Control Panel. Click Add and you’ll see a list of the free CSEs that you own or that have been shared with you.  Select the free CSEs you wish to add and click OK. All group members will immediately share the quota of your GSS.

We hope you’ll find this much easier than trying to estimate your quota needs for each of your individual search engines. To learn more about Business Groups, please visit our help center. Let us know what you think in our discussion forum.

Posted by: Yong Zhu, Software Engineer

The Custom Search engineers spent 2011 launching great features. But we still hear from our users

Custom Search Autocompletions allow you to add to the list of useful queries users see as they type in the search box. Today we are announcing two major improvements.

Promotions in Autocomplete:

Promotions are a great way to call special attention to a result by putting it at the top of search results and making it visually distinct. Now you can choose to display them in autocomplete too. To enable this feature, simply click Show promotions in autocomplete in the Promotions section of your CSE’s Control Panel. Note that promotions based on regular expressions or the $q variable will not appear in autocomplete.

If you’d like to have promotions that appear in autocomplete but not in search results, you can add them via the new Autocomplete Promotion tab of the Custom Autocompletions in the Autocompletion section of your CSE’s Control Panel.

Match mode:

Match mode give you options for how Google displays autocompletions. The following are now available in the Promotions section of your CSE’s Control Panel. Changes to match mode will require you to update the CSE code snippet on your site.

• Prefix (default) mode matches the opening words of the user’s query: “how to bake” will trigger “how to bake a pie”.
• Ordered mode doesn’t require the words to be in the opening, but their order must match the user’s query: “bake a pie” will trigger “how to bake a pie”.
• Any mode matches regardless of the order of the words in the user’s query. “pie bake” will trigger “how to bake a pie”.

We hope these new options make autocompletions even more useful for your site. Read more about Promotions in Autocomplete and Match mode. Let us know what you think in our discussion forum.

Posted by: Min Zeng, Software Engineer

Since the launch of Custom Search in 2006, CSE has powered searches on a broad range of sites on the web. Until now, those CSEs have only returned text-based results, but in some cases images can be a much faster, easier and more visually appealing way to search. For photos-focused sites, image results are a great way to showcase your beautiful photos and help visitors to your site quickly and easily find the photos they want. We also think sites focused on news, celebrities, art and digital production assets will similarly benefit.

Now you can add an image results tab to your CSE to offer your visitors image-only results in a variety of image-optimized presentation formats. Once you enable this feature, your CSE will have two tabs. The first has your current web search results and the second, Image tab, contains the image search results. Here’s an example from India-Forums.com:


Enabling image results is easy! Just visit the Basics page of your CSE’s Control Panel and check the Enable image search checkbox. You can change the layout of your image results on the Look and feel page.


Once enabled, you’ll also be able to get separate image search reports from your CSE’s Statistics page.

This new feature is available to all users of our Custom Search Element (you will need to Get Code and update your site). Since we are transitioning all iframe users to the Element, this should be most sites. Our Google Site Search users can also access Image Results via XML. To learn more about Image Search for Custom Search, please visit our help center. Let us know what you think in our discussion forum.

Update: check out the New York Times Image Search app powered by Google Custom Search.

Posted by: Peng Zhao, Software Engineer

Custom Search promotions enable you to put relevant information at the top of your search results for specific queries.


Today, we’re announcing several new features to give you more flexibility on how and when to trigger them.





We hope these new features make it easier for you to use promotions on your site. For more details and instructions, please visit our help center. Let us know what you think in our discussion forum.

Posted by: Weiyu Zhu, Software Engineer

In August we transitioned all Google-hosted Custom Search Engines to the Custom Search Element. Now we are transitioning iframe CSEs as well. No work is required from CSE owners. Moving from the iframe option to the Element enables those CSEs to take advantage of our latest features, like automatic thumbnails.

If you had an iframe CSE, we encourage you to visit your Control Panel to find new tools for customized presentation and results. As always, we appreciate your feedback in the user forum.

Posted by: Liang Ch'ng, Software Engineer

As we announced in our Official Google Blog post, Custom Search technology is powering the new National Resource Directory (NRD) job search engine of more than 500,000 job openings from employers around the country. This initiative is a creative application of structured search to provide a highly customized search experience.


Want to learn more about how this works? First of all, like all custom search engines, this uses the power and scale of Google search to constantly crawl the web, looking for structured data to add to the Google index. In this case, sites like simplyhired.com have added JobPosting markup from Schema.org to their sites to help search engines identify veteran-committed job openings, job title, job location, etc.

Recognizing that many job seekers are interested in jobs in their local area, the NRD did some extra work to support a location-based search. When a user specifies a location such as a city or a zipcode in a search, the location is converted into a list of nearby cities with normalized names that match those location markups in the job posting webpages.

To restrict results to only the relevant job postings, for every user query on their site, NRD sends a well formed query request to Google Custom Search including structured search operators such as filtering by cities and job codes and sorting by date to receive XML results and render them on their site.

We’re happy to contribute to this important initiative and hope the power of Google Custom Search can help more businesses to deliver creative search solutions for their users.

Posted by: Hui Xu, Technical Lead, Custom Search Team

A picture is worth more than a thousand words when it helps search users choose the result they

Many Custom Search users also regularly use Webmaster Tools. To make their lives more convenient, we’ve added a “Custom Search” feature to the Labs section of Webmaster Tools. This allows you to change your basic configuration, including the list of sites to search, and get the new code without leaving Webmaster Tools.

For users who have never created a Custom Search Engine, it helps you get started by automatically creating a default CSE that searches the current site selected in Webmaster Tools.

We hope these new features make it easier for you to provide a great search experience for visitors to your site. And as always, we welcome your feedback.

Posted by Sharon Xiao, Software Engineering Intern, and Ying Huang, Software Engineer

Google Analytics Site Search reports provide extensive data on how people search your site once they are already on it.  You can see initial searches, refinements, search trends, which pages they searched from, where they ended up, and conversion correlation.  In the past we admit that setup was a little challenging, but we’re happy to announce that now we’ve made it easy to setup Site Search tracking directly from your Custom Search Engine.

If you are already a Google Analytics user (and your site has the Google Analytics tracking code on its pages), go to the Custom Search Engine management page, select your CSE’s control panel and click on Google Analytics from the left-hand menu.  We’ll display a list of your Google Analytics web properties so you can select one and tell us the query and category parameters that you want to track.


Once you save your changes, we’ll generate a new code snippet.  Copy it from the Get Code page, paste it into your site and setup is complete!


 You can then access Site Search reports from the Content section of Google Analytics.


Happy analyzing!  If needed, you can find help with setup here and an explanation of the differences between Google Analytics and Custom Search statistics here.  Let us know what you think in our discussion forum.

Posted by: Zhong Wang, Software Engineer

Custom Search users have long been able to create Richer Snippets by adding Pagemaps to their webpages. Today we’re enabling direct submission of Pagemaps via either Sitemaps or On-Demand Indexing requests. This means you no longer have to modify your pages to expose Pagemaps, or wait for Google to crawl your site to process them. This saves time when you want to make a quick change to your metadata. If you have data you would like to be displayed on your site, such as reviews snippets, you can submit it directly to Google instead of putting it in publicly visible markup on your pages. For added security, you can even choose to add a private key to your Pagemap and we will only serve it in Custom Search results when that key is provided.

We hope you enjoy the added convenience these new submission options offer. Let us know what you think in our discussion forum.

Posted by: Rui Jiang, Software Engineer

Two months ago we announced that all Google-hosted Custom Search Engines would be upgraded to use the Element. We’re happy to report that that transition is now complete for all Custom Search users. Those that visit the Control Panel will find better tools for customizing the presentation of their CSEs.

Moving to the Element enables us to quickly deliver new features that Custom Search users can easily turn on for their sites and we will soon upgrade all iframe results to use embedded Elements.

As always, we look forward to your feedback.

Posted by: Liang Ch'ng, Software Engineer

We’ve been hard at work making improvements to the Google Custom Search Element that will enhance the look and feel of search results when users type into your custom search query box. You’ll see some of the fruits of these labors starting today. We’ve just launched a set of templates that take advantage of rich snippets markup to provide customized results layouts for specific structured data. Your markup can enhance the display of structured information in addition to enabling the powerful metadata features, such as Sort by Attribute and Restrict to Range that we released last year.

For example, there’s a Review template that will show ratings and expand on-demand to display reviews within a result as shown in the screenshot below:


This specific treatment is used when you use hreview and hreview-aggregate Microformat markup on your pages. Template rendering changes are automatic if you use the Element.

Templates that we now support include: People, Product, Recipe, Organization, Review and Review Aggregate. Try these out at our demo search site. Here’s an example of a Recipe result, using a custom theme.


For more information on markup that you can use for Google.com and Custom Search, please refer to our documentation. Don’t forget that we also support image thumbnails and actions. Further, if you are marking up your pages, you can verify that we recognize the right attributes by using our Rich Snippets Preview Tool.

We are constantly adding support for additional markup formats, so stay tuned. We’re continuing to add innovative features to the Element to help you turbo-charge your Custom Search results presentation. As always, we look forward to your feedback.

Posted by: Edison Nica, Software Engineer

When we launched On-Demand Indexing in Custom Search, our goal was to make it possible for you to include your new and changed pages quickly in your website’s search results. Since then, we’ve improved indexing freshness and doubled On-Demand indexing quotas. Today, we’re happy to announce further improvements to On-Demand Indexing that make the process simpler and more flexible.

First, we’re providing a new On-Demand Indexing API, which will allow you to initiate indexing actions programmatically. Your content management systems can trigger these new APIs when new content is being published, so that changes on your website are reflected automatically in Custom Search results.

Previously, you needed to provide validated Sitemaps in Webmaster Tools and then select a Sitemap for On-Demand Indexing in the Custom Search control panel. Now, to make this process simpler, you can submit Sitemaps directly within the Custom Search control panel. At this time, we will only consider URLs that belong to the same host serving the Sitemap and for sites verified by the owner of the Custom Search engine.

The best improvement: we now allow you to delete URLs from inclusion in your search. If a page on your site has been deleted, or has content that is inappropriate and you want to eliminate it from search results right away, you can list the URL in your sitemap and mark it for deletion by using an “expires” tag. For more information on this, and the new On-Demand Indexing API, please refer to our documentation. Based on the type of search engine you own, you have certain quotas for URL indexing and removal. You should be able to verify your quota usage in the control panel.


We hope that these changes make it easier for you to control the search experience for your users. As always, we look forward to your feedback.

Posted by: Rui Jiang, Software Engineer

Ever since the launch of Custom Search, users have asked us to provide more flexible options to

Many of you have requested a simpler process for transferring Google Site Search ownership to a

Until now, CSE has had a simple collaboration feature that lets the owner of a custom search engine

Cross posted on the Google Enterprise Blog
 
St. James’s Palace just launched www.officialroyalwedding2011.org, a website celebrating the forthcoming marriage of Prince William and Miss Catherine Middleton. The website is the official information hub for anyone interested in the Royal Wedding, and if you browse the website you might notice something familiar: instant, crisp, and relevant search results powered by Google.




Whether you’re looking for more information about the reception, or are simply curious about who Miss Middleton appointed as her Maid of Honour, Google Site Search will quickly direct you to the most relevant results.

We’re thrilled to be assisting St. James’s Palace with their website search engine. Our congratulations to the happy couple!


Posted by: Rajat Mukherjee, Group Product Manager

In the past several months we’ve added several new features to Google Custom Search – and we have you to thank! More than a year ago, we told you about a new Google Custom Search Product Ideas page, and since then you’ve voted thousands of times on all sorts of great ideas for improving the product. That doesn't even include the stellar suggestions we get on a regular basis in the help forum. In fact, query autocompletion was a help forum suggestion from swoodby that’s now available with just a few clicks in the Control Panel. We’re thrilled that we have this productive feedback loop with you, and want to report back on some of the product iterations we made during the past year.

Wireless data consumption has more than doubled every year, so we’re happy to have added mobile search features to the product. As requested on the Product Ideas page, users can now search on your website using their mobile devices. The default homepage for your custom search engine is now optimized for your on-the-go users. We will continue to optimize Custom Search to meet the needs of a growing mobile user base.

In response to your requests for metadata capabilities, we launched a set of features to support structured custom search. You now have the ability to filter by attributes such as author, define attribute ranges such as dates, and sort by specific attribute values such as ratings. We plan to make these metadata features even easier to use through the Custom Search Element, which generates code that you can copy and paste to easily add Custom Search to any website.

You’ve also made it clear from your feedback that you love customizing your search engine and adding your own flair. So, over time we’ve made it possible for you to tweak the layout of your results, customize your synonyms, control autocompletions, and apply custom styles to your search engine. Now it’s even possible to select a theme for your ads.

What’s the moral of the story here? Your mic is on and we’re listening. Keep the feedback coming in the help forum (the Product Ideas page is closed for now) and we’ll continue working to make Custom Search better. After all, it’s really your product.

Posted by: Kelly Fee, Associate, Consumer Operations

Last year, we introduced structured custom search. If you mark up your pages with custom metadata attributes, you can render them with your search results, and also restrict results based on specific attribute values.

Today, we’re happy to be releasing 2 additional metadata features:

• Sort by Attribute: order search results based on values of specific attributes
• Restrict to Range: only return search results with attributes within a defined range

For example, if you mark up your pages with custom metadata attributes, like dates, ratings and prices, you can order your search results by these attributes, such as sort by date, bias towards highly rated items, or restrict to a specific price range.

SignonSanDiego.com, a California news portal, uses the new Sort by Attribute feature in conjunction with the Google Custom Search Element to render recent stories with photos in the results:


SignOnSanDiego uses the new sort operator. The sort operator comes in several flavors, from a mild bias to strict sort ordering; SignonSanDiego.com uses a strong bias towards the publication date to ensure readers see not only the most relevant, but also timely news.

To implement the new features, you must mark up the pages you are searching with the attributes you want to use. You can do this via PageMaps; the PageMap used by SignOnSanDiego looks like this:

<PageMap>
<DataObject type="date">
<Attribute name="displaydate" value="Wednesday, August 25, 2010"/>
<Attribute name="sdate" value="20100825"/>
</DataObject>

<DataObject type="thumbnail">
<Attribute name="src" value="http://media.signonsandiego.com/img/photos/2010/08/25/635a63e9-f4a1-45aa-835a-ebee666b82e0news.ap.org_t100.jpg"/>
<Attribute name="width" value="100"/>
</DataObject>
</PageMap>

SignOnSanDiego’s publication date is stored in the DataObject of type ‘date’ as the Attribute named ‘sdate’; to specify this field you combine the type and name into a single field ‘date-sdate’. To apply Sort by Attribute over date-sdate, you set the sort option in the search code for the Element as shown below:

...
var options = {};
options[google.search.Search.RESTRICT_EXTENDED_ARGS] = {'sort': 'date-sdate:d:s'};
customSearchControl = new google.search.CustomSearchControl('000525776413497593842:aooj-2z_jjm', options);
...

The sort option {'sort': 'date-sdate:d:s'} takes a combined attribute name, like ‘date-sdate’, and several optional parameters separated by colons. In this case, SignOnSanDiego has specified sorting in descending order (d) using the strong bias (s) flavor of the operator. Without qualifiers, the default is to use a descending order with a hard sort. You can also choose to sort in ascending order (a), or use a weak sort flavor (w) or explicitly specify a strict hard sort (h).

The sort option also enables the Restrict to Range feature. For example a site like SignOnSanDiego might enable users to search for articles published in the last week. To implement this, you can set the sort options to “date-sdate:r:20101206:20101213”. This again uses the combined attribute name (date-sdate), but instead restricts to the range (r) of specified values (20101206:20101213). Multiple operators can be combined in the sort option using a comma. For example, to combine SignOnSanDiego’s strong bias with the above date restriction, you would specify “date-sdate:d:s,date-sdate:r:20101206:20101213”.

The Sort by Attribute and Restrict to Range features are a powerful new set of options that gives you a great deal of control over your search application, allowing you to use custom attributes to order and restrict your search results in very powerful ways for your users. For example, a movie review site can display the most highly rated movies released within the last week by combining distinct attributes in the sort operator, e.g., “review-rating,release-date:r:20101206:20101213”.

A few more tips:
1. With custom data rendering, you can customize your results even further.
2. You can always validate your metadata markup with the use of the rich snippet preview tool.
3. If you are not using the Element, you can always use the same sort options in the sort URL parameter, e.g., “&sort=date-sdate”.

For more details on these new features, please refer to our documentation. As always, we’re looking to you for feedback.

Posted by: Anthony Francis and Roger Wang, Software Engineers

Today, we announced the Google APIs console, a new tool to help you use our product APIs in your applications and on your websites. Included in the console is a new Custom Search API.

We’ve enhanced our Custom Search offering with the introduction of new output formats and a new API. Now, in addition to using the Custom Search element or the XML API, the new API offers search results using your choice of Atom or JSON syndication formats. For more information, please refer to our post on the Google Code blog.

Posted by: Adam Feldman, Product Manager and Rajat Mukherjee, Group Product Manager

Query autocompletion has been the most popular feature in the history of Custom Search. Users love it, and websites use it to help people find alternate queries that get them to the right information faster.

Since launch, one of the most commonly requested features has been administrative control over the autocompletions that surface when people start typing their queries. We’re happy to announce that you can now control inclusions and exclusions to autocompletions.

For example, on our sample restaurant review search engine, typing “che” triggers an autocompletion for “cheese” and not “cheese jalapeno poppers", one of our tasty snacks. Typing “chicken” did uncover “chicken livers” (ugh!) but did not propose “chicken tandoori”, an interesting menu item that we’d like to promote to our users.


With the new inclusion and exclusion options in the control panel, managing autocompletions is a breeze: we just added “cheese” and “chicken livers” to the list of exclusions, and inserted “chicken tandoori” and “cheese jalapeno poppers” into the included autocompletion list.


A few hours of processing, and the new autocomplete modifications kick in.


We hope you enjoy the new controls that further enhance autocompletions on your search engine. You can even upload included and excluded autocompletions in bulk in the control panel. Let us know if you have any feedback, and enjoy your spicy cheese poppers!

Posted by: Andy Herrman, Software Engineer and Salmaan Rashid, Senior Technical Solutions Engineer

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