Google Data

Posted by: Nicholas Weininger, Software Engineer

Custom Search enables anyone to create a tuned search experience that's contextually relevant. For example:

• Individuals can create a personalized search experience around their bookmarks, blogs, and public web sites
• Web site owners can provide Site Search
• Publishers can provide search across multiple publications
• Communities can collaborate to create topical search engines across thousands of web pages

For bloggers, blogging platforms typically provide in-built search tools that allow searching across published blog posts, or across tags and categories. With Custom Search, you can go one step further: you can define a search experience that evolves over time, and includes not just your blog posts, but links extracted from those posts, as well as links from your blog's link lists and blog lists - in short, all items of interest related to your blog.

If you author a blog on Blogger, we've built a search gadget for you that does this - the AJAX Custom Search gadget creates a Linked Custom Search engine that automatically updates to allow your readers to search your blog's entire neighbo(u)rhood. It is a uniquely flavo(u)red search experience that gets richer over time. Search results appear inline, so your users don't have to leave your blog. The results inherit the look and feel of the blog, as shown in the screenshot below.

On Blogger, you can add the gadget with a couple of clicks:

1. Edit your blog's layout (Page Elements tab)
2. Click on "Add a Gadget" and configure the new "Search Box" gadget.

You can configure tabs that will allow your blog's readers to restrict their search to specific link lists or blog lists; you decide which ones you want to configure.

If you are using this gadget, we'd love to hear your feedback in our discussion group.

The AJAX Search and the Custom Search APIs have also been combined to create the Custom Search element that we recently announced at Google I/O.