Sunday, November 05, 2006

Google Custom Search

Hi Everyone,

I thought I would bring to your attention a very cool new feature of Google. Google is now letting us create our own custom search engines, based on a list of websites that we choose. I've started playing around with it here at FoodBlogSearch.com (got the domain name because it is a lot easier to remember than the long Google URL). I often like to link to other food blogs in my posts and this custom search makes it easy to search the food blogs I frequent.

Google is also letting us put the search bar, and the results of the searches directly into our own websites. I have an example of that working here at my list of food blogs. Susan V has also incorporated this feature in her list of food blogs on FatFree Vegan Kitchen.

You can set it up so other people can contribute to the list of sites searched (Alanna and Kalyn are contributing to mine.) You can include a little Google widget so that people can add the search bar to their personalized Google home page.

It's not perfect. It returns results based on page rank and not the most recent entries. It usually takes a week or two for new entries to show up in the Google index so you usually don't get the most recent posts. But I have already found it quite useful. The link to create your own custom search engine is http://www.google.com/coop/.

Enjoy!

This Post was written by Elise from Simply Recipes

11 comments:

Jocelyn:McAuliflower said...

excellent url grab Elise!!

I have been dreaming of Google's custom search tool... about time! :)

I'm looking forward to this- as it would be wonderful to see it power over the recipe section on Google Base or Yahoo Food.

Nic said...

Brilliant idea, Elise!

Sam said...

great idea, except if it could read an OPML file from my rss then it would be near perfect.

Susan Voisin said...

Sam,it can read an OPML. You just have to upload it using the Advanced settings in Google Co-Op. Unfortunately, I didn't find that out until I had added all of mine manually first. :-/

Anonymous said...

Thanks Elise.

Julie said...

That is really cool! Thanks, Elise.

Anonymous said...

oooh - thanks susanV!
asomething to play with tonight!

Susan Voisin said...

Thanks, Elise! And thanks to Alanna for letting me know about Google Co-op. I've really enjoyed playing around with it.

Meeta K. Wolff said...

Thanks Elise! This is great! CAn play around a bit over the weekend!!

Elise said...

Those wine blog searches are cool. If others implement this feature, I would love to know how it goes for you. Alanna has already set a couple searches up on her site.

Elise said...

Hi Andrew,
That's a great one, thanks! I'm discovering lots of wonderful new-to-me blogs from using your search engine.