Google Data » Jennifer Hyman

Better branding part II

Jennifer Hyman — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 23:41:00 +0000

Posted by: Jennifer Hyman, Product Marketing Manager

In tandem with the search results branding changes, we've just updated and implemented new search box branding for CSEs as well. You can now select from 7 different search box branding options to fit the look and feel of your site. You'll find these different branding options on the Code page in your Custom Search Engine Control Panel. If you were previously using the watermark branding option that sits within the search box, we have automatically updated this logo to match the new updated branding.

We're always working to improve and enhance CSEs look, feel and functionality, and hope you agree that this new branding is a step in the right direction. To learn more about CSE branding, visit our branding guidelines. And as always, please keep the feedback coming.

Better branding part I

Jennifer Hyman — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 21:39:00 +0000

Posted by: Jennifer Hyman, Product Marketing Manager

In our constant quest to simplify things, we've made a small, but important change to the language you see from Google on Custom Search Engine search results pages. Now, instead of the long string of text that previously said "Google search results customized by [XYZ site] using Google Co-op," you'll see a small Google logo with the words Custom Search. We think this new branding is an improvement both in design and clarity -- not only do the search results look better, but it should be clearer to your users that they're benefiting from Google CSE.

Later this week, we plan to roll out some additional branding options for your search boxes, and hope you like our first attempt to improve the look and feel and of your CSE.

Site search gets supplemental

Jennifer Hyman — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 15:19:00 +0000

Posted by: Patrick Riley, Software Engineer

One of the common uses of Custom Search Engines is to provide site search. A number of users have suggested that we can improve Custom Search for this application by also including supplemental results in Custom Search Engine's results. We put fewer constraints on what pages go into our supplemental index and therefore there are many pages which are available only there. This is our first step to give you more results. If your search engine operates as a filter and has three sites or less or your search engine includes the whole web, you'll get supplemental results as well. For example, take a look at the Hanayama Puzzle Store search engine I've created. Hanayama makes some great puzzles, but they aren't always so easy to find. The queries "hanayama baroq" (possibly my favorite puzzle of all time) and "hanayama laby" only return supplemental results in this search engine. Check out the FAQ entry about supplemental results for more information.

Here’s some love for our Custom Search friends

Jennifer Hyman — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 17:16:00 +0000

Posted by: Mike Cancel, Community Manager

Since it launched in October, we've been pleasantly surprised by the nice ecosystem that has built up around Custom Search Engines. Here are some of the more interesting resources we've found outside Google that you might find useful. Happy V-Day from us to you!

Tools
Add CSE to browser (firefox and IE)

Importing del.icio.us bookmarks for CSE (aka Vik's tool)

Lijit: Personal Network Search

Lists
Finding Google Custom Search Engines

List Your Custom Search Indexes

Directories
CSE Links Directory

CustomSearchEngine.com - the directory of Google Custom Search Engines

Guide to Custom Search Engines

Workarounds
Using ASP.NET site with CSE

Google Custom Search Results Page on Your Wordpress with Adsense Deluxe

How to save search queries on Google Custom Search Engine

Google Co-op - An Intro & Some Insider Hacks

New statistics page

Jennifer Hyman — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 21:39:00 +0000

Posted by: Matt Wytock, Software Engineer

We've added a new statistics page so you can see what people are searching for on your Custom Search Engine -- information such as overall traffic to your search engine and popular queries is now available. And you can view this info by day, week, month -- or even the entire lifetime of your search engine.

So check it out by going to the My search engines page and follow the "statistics" link next to the name of your search engine.

The top CSEs

Jennifer Hyman — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 20:06:00 +0000

Posted by: Jennifer Hyman, Product Marketing Manager

You may have been wondering how your CSE is performing and how it compares to those other people are creating. The first step in sharing Custom Search metrics with you is the Most Popular list of Custom Search Engines, as defined by volume of queries. This list spans a variety of sites: large, small and across industries and topics. You'll see search engines built for techies, music lovers, sports fans, climate scientists, universities and more. Individual site owners and large organizations are seeing success with their CSEs.

We plan to update this list every couple of weeks so you can gauge the activity of the Custom Search community as well as how your CSE is performing. Stay tuned for more such metrics updates, too.

Happy collaborating!

Jennifer Hyman — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 21:17:00 +0000

Posted by: Vrishali Wagle, Software Engineer

We've made several improvements to the Custom Search collaboration process. Starting today, you'll be able to communicate more easily with new volunteers for your Custom Search Engine -- you'll see the email addresses of new volunteers as well as approved contributors. It's important to note that this process works both ways -- i.e., if you volunteer to contribute to a search engine, your email address will also be visible to the creator of the search engine. To see the email addresses of contributors simply go to the "Collaboration" section of the "Control Panel" of your search engine and you will see a list of contributors emails there. You will also get email notification when your invitee accepts your invitation to contribute to your Custom Search Engine. Last but certainly not least, you can now also see the sites your contributors have added to your search engine. Visit the "Sites" tab in the "Control Panel" to see what work your contributors are doing. If you have several contributors, you'll have a drop-down menu to select which contributor you'd like to view. We hope you find these features useful in building and maintaining your CSEs.

No more extra white space after search results

Jennifer Hyman — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 20:58:00 +0000

Posted by: Matt Wytock, Software Engineer

Many of you have complained about the extra white space at the bottom of the Custom Search results hosted on your page. We've heard you, and have rolled out a fix for better integration between your search engine and the rest of your site.

Here are some examples of search results with extra white space:

sla
binary tree

And here they are with the fix:

sla
binary tree

This fix is now enabled by default on all Custom Search Engines. If you experience problems, you can revert to the old behavior by adding this line to your search results snippet:

var googleSearchResizeIframe = false;

Custom Search in your language

Jennifer Hyman — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 22:14:00 +0000

Posted by: Tania Bedrax-Weiss, Software Engineer

It has always been our goal to enable anyone, anywhere create a Custom Search Engine. We're pleased to announce that we're getting closer to that goal. As of today, you can now create a Custom Search Engine for most languages and if you choose, you can give preference to results from a certain country as well. Here's how it works:

For the time being, you have to go to http://google.com/coop/cse/ to create your search engine (in the future, we will have versions of CSE for each country). On the main CSE site, you will now however, have the option to specify the language for your Custom Search. The language you choose will set the language for the text on the search results page and give preference to results in that language. You can also choose 'All Languages' in which case the language associated with the user's browser will be used. If you want to give preference to search results from a particular domain, you can do so as pattern later on. If, for instance, you wanted your search results to only be from Japan, you would include *.jp as a pattern. (Please note the * is essential.) You can also choose to give preference to results from a certain country by changing your code to use the country specific google domain (e.g., such as google.ru or google.es as opposed to google.com). Please see http://google.com/coop/docs/cse/hosting.html for the details.

Caveats: If your search box is on a web page where the character encoding is not utf-8, you will need to specify the correct input encoding from the standard list. Support is in only for left-to-right languages, right-to-left languages such as Hebrew or Arabic are not supported at this time

Making it easier to specify entire domains

Jennifer Hyman — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 18:09:00 +0000

Posted by: Vrishali Wagle, Software Engineer

A number of you have asked for the ability to specify entire domains (such as all the hosts that are part of stanford.edu or all the sites under ca.gov) in your CSEs so that you can more easily build a comprehensive search engine. We listened to your feedback, and starting today you can specify such patterns in your index.

To illustrate the power of this new customization addition, we created a few interesting demo search engines for you to review.

One searches across all the US Department of Energy funded laboratories, which we're calling a National Labs Search Engine. Another one searches across all the Indian Institutes of Technology, which we've called the IIT Search Engine. Please note that these are not CSEs Google will be maintaining; rather, we wanted to show you some possible ways to use this new feature. We hope you find this new addition useful to your Custom Search efforts. Please continue to give us your feedback.

New CSE Role Models

Jennifer Hyman — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 02:44:00 +0000

Posted by: Nikki Pfarr, User Experience Designer

You've given us some great feedback so far on the Custom Search Engine (CSE). In particular, many of you have requested more sophisticated examples of existing CSEs, so you can learn from and reference them. We agree that there's no better way to discover its potential than from many examples out there. In response to your requests, we've expanded our featured examples page. It's now filled with dozens of examples that showcase the powerful features of the Custom Search Engine. You can easily browse through a number of categories including Information, Technology, Culture, Lifestyle, Latest, and Google Picks.

This is our first pass at improving our list of example search engines. Moving forward, we plan to continually expand and improve these pages. In the meantime, stay tuned for more updates and keep the feedback coming. We're excited to work with you to make the Custom Search Engine an even more powerful tool.

Specialized results in your search engine

Jennifer Hyman — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 17:43:00 +0000

Posted by: Nick Weininger, Co-op Engineer

Many of you have told us that it would be useful to be able to add Subscribed Links to your Custom Search Engines (CSEs). That way, you could include all sorts of real-time status data and helpful answers in your customized search results pages, and take advantage of the wide variety of special search features already available from otherSubscribed Links creators.

We thought that was a good idea too, so we implemented it. Now you can list the Subscribed Links you want to add in the XML specification of your CSE, and just like that, they'll appear in your customized search results. Our documentation tells you how and illustrates with an example.

Some special search features you can add this way include:

Real-time flight status information from FlightStats or subway train times from TrainCheck.
Article snippets from Wikipedia and Answers.com.
News from Digg and IGN.
Demographic information from CityTownInfo.

Browse our directory to get an idea of the things Subscribed Links can do to enhance your results. Or make your own and share your expertise with your own users and other CSE creators while you design the best results for queries in your domain of knowledge.

Last but not least, we also wanted to mention that a number of advanced Co-op users have requested the ability to download all their annotations, including those created using the Google Marker. You can now do so by going to the advanced tab of your control panel and get your annotations in XML or in a tab delimited format.