Search Your Site
Another new toy from Google - this time, you can create your own site search.
With a few simple setup instructions, you can create one, or many, search gadgets, based on the sites you want to include in your customized search.
For example, I have several blogs. For my own purposes, and to encourage readers of my blogs, I have created a tool that will search all my blogs for the search string input. So while a reader may have found me while reading about tech news, he can also search my book blog for topics of interest.
Let's say you do a lot of research on a given subject, and you revisit a handful of sites over and over to get information on that topic. Maybe it's a health and fitness issue, or something to do with kids or pets. Rather than go to each site and run the same search over and over, you can simply access your customized search engine, type in your search string, and all the sites you have specified will be searched at once. You can include the rest of the web as well, but the idea behind this tool is to narrow your search down for very specific results.
To get started, you'll need that always-required Google account. Now, go to Google Custom Search. You'll be asked to enter a few simple things, like the name of your search engine, the sites to be searched, and so forth. Finally, you test your engine to see what kind of results are returned.
This was sort of interesting - when I first completed my custom engine, I searched on the term "Tunnels," because I knew I had just written a book review on a book with that name, and I had included that word in my labels for the post. But I got no results! I went back and checked my URLs and other settings, and everything seemed to be in order. I ran the search again, and actually had to run it three times before I got results. Evidently, you have to allow Google a few minutes to index your sites before you will see results.
Now, I was able to create a gadget that could be added to both my blog pages, and to my iGoogle home page. I was able to customize its general look and width, and then Google Custom Search generated the code I could cut and paste into my blogs.
I literally took me less time to set up than to write this article!
Give it a try!
With a few simple setup instructions, you can create one, or many, search gadgets, based on the sites you want to include in your customized search.
For example, I have several blogs. For my own purposes, and to encourage readers of my blogs, I have created a tool that will search all my blogs for the search string input. So while a reader may have found me while reading about tech news, he can also search my book blog for topics of interest.
Let's say you do a lot of research on a given subject, and you revisit a handful of sites over and over to get information on that topic. Maybe it's a health and fitness issue, or something to do with kids or pets. Rather than go to each site and run the same search over and over, you can simply access your customized search engine, type in your search string, and all the sites you have specified will be searched at once. You can include the rest of the web as well, but the idea behind this tool is to narrow your search down for very specific results.
To get started, you'll need that always-required Google account. Now, go to Google Custom Search. You'll be asked to enter a few simple things, like the name of your search engine, the sites to be searched, and so forth. Finally, you test your engine to see what kind of results are returned.
This was sort of interesting - when I first completed my custom engine, I searched on the term "Tunnels," because I knew I had just written a book review on a book with that name, and I had included that word in my labels for the post. But I got no results! I went back and checked my URLs and other settings, and everything seemed to be in order. I ran the search again, and actually had to run it three times before I got results. Evidently, you have to allow Google a few minutes to index your sites before you will see results.
Now, I was able to create a gadget that could be added to both my blog pages, and to my iGoogle home page. I was able to customize its general look and width, and then Google Custom Search generated the code I could cut and paste into my blogs.
I literally took me less time to set up than to write this article!
Give it a try!
Comments