8.8 Google’s Custom Search Engine

One of the things I love most about Google is that they’re always improving their services and coming up with new ways of earning money through websites.

I’ve never been very enthusiastic about Google’s Search boxes. I’ve always seen them more of an added functionality for my users than a way of earning extra revenue.

Google’s Custom Search Engines though change all that. These let you limit the scope of a user’s search to sites that you’ve selected.

What’s the advantage of that?

Enter any keyword into a Google and only a fraction of the results are going to be relevant. Google might be a very powerful search engine, but to get the information you need, you’ll still have to filter out the sites with poor content, little information and ads instead of text.

A custom search engine lets you do that for your users so that they don’t have to do it themselves. Not only will they then be more likely to leave your site through your search box, they might even come back to your site every time they want to search for information on your topic.

Building your own search engine is very simple. You can start here: http://google.com/coop/cse/. You can even format your search results