October 24, 2006
Bootstrapping Google Custom Search Engines with searchfeedr
Google have just announced their Custom Search Engine rival to Yahoo's search builder and Windows Live Macros.
I've just had a quick play, and it's got far more going for it than I first realised.
The basic customisation lets you define the domains over which you want to limit search to, or prioritise search over. You can add up to a couple of thousand (I think) domains to your search engine, which puts the 15 or so that searchfeedr limits you to (and Rollyo doesn't offer many more) to some sort of shame... except when you consider that searchers rarely go beyond the first page of search results anyway...
Links can be added individually, or via a bookmarklet, by he custom search engine owner or their volunteers. Volunteers may be invitees only (Google going viral withthe marketing once again...), or the search engine can be open for anyone to submit links to.
Domains can also be excluded from the search engine (handy if you are using submitted domains for prioritised results in a general web search). Various filters can also be applied to URLs that are allowed as results, though I haven't tried this feature out yet.
Something else I haven't had time to try out yet are 'refinements':
Refinements are labels that you apply to web sites. They appear as a list of links above search results, offering users a way to narrow their search. When a user clicks a refinement label, the sites that you have labeled are given priority in the results. In addition to labeling sites, you can also specify additional words that are added to users' queries when they click a label, providing even more targeted results.
The look and feel of your custom search engine can be tweaked in several ways, including adding your own logo to the search box on the Google search results page. Your custom search engine can also be monetised (don't you just hate that word) using your AdSense account details.
One thing tht particulalry caught my eye were the bulk upload and XML configuration options. Adding links to your search engine one at a time can be rather painful, so google have provided the facility to upload links contianed in an OPML file. The example they give is of a Bloglines OPML (blogroll export) file. I assume this is a sideswipe at the relatively new 'search over my blogs' option that Bloglines started to provide via Ask.com...
Now a major constraint that searchfeedr has is the limited number of domains that you can limit a search over. However, by quickly adding a 'generate OPML' option that will generate a full* list of domains than a list artificially limited to 15 entries I can very quickly seed a more comprehensive Google Custom Search Engine:
*Err, that's not quite true, I limit the numer of links pulled down from delicious during a deliSearch.
Anyway, I posted the OPML generation extension to the searchfeedr interface, so if anyone uses to seed a Google Custom Search Engine with any degree of success or failure, please let me know :-)
Posted by ajh59 at October 24, 2006 04:03 PM