Google Custom Search: Build Your Own Google

What if you could create your own version of Google, and do it almost instantly? Starting today, you can, sort of--thanks to Google Custom Search Engine, a new Google feature that lets you create subsets of the whole Google search engine, then do interesting things with them. In short, it's a way to carve off chunks of Google and customize them into a specialty search engine with a specific focus.

Here, for instance, is a search engine I just built--it took about two minutes--that only returns results from PC World's blogs, including Today @ PC World, Steve Bass's Tips and Tweaks, and Digital World. (If you do a search, you'll end up at a results page at Google--back up to this page to continue reading this post. Or don't...)

Building a Google Custom Search Engine that just searches your site is useful, but not exactly new--in fact, another Google service with the odd name Google Free (since when has Google charged for much of anything?) has let you do that for a long time.

But Google Custom Search Engines, unlike Google Free, don't make you choose between searching one site or the entire Web--when you create one, you specify how many (or few) sites get searched. If you love movies and have 26 favorite movie related sites, for instance, your Google Custom Search Engine might provide results from just those sites.

Here's another one I built in a few minutes, focused on a dozen sites with content about Palm's Treo smartphones. All these sites are in full-blown Google too, of course, but because this engine is Treo-specific, you can be more vague and still get Treo-specific results--for instance, a simple search for "office suite" will get you results dominated bby information about Treo-compatible suites, not Microsoft Office...

Both of the engines I embedded in this post are Google Custom Search in its quickest and dirtiest form. But a custom engine could include hundreds of sites on a given topic, for a truly rich experience. You can also do things like customize the engine's look and feel, embed the results into your own site, and create a collaborative engine that multiple folks can beef up with new sites.

Google Custom Search also hooks up with Google's AdSense advertising platform, so it's possible to create a search engine that's accompanied by text ads you can make money from. (Search results include ads in all cases; this is one new Google feature that has a clear financial benefit to Google from the get-go.)

Playing around with Google Custom Search, it's not hard to see opportunities for Google to make it more sophisticated. For instance, you can restrict search results to the sites you specify or provide results from the entire Web, but skew to the sites you choose. But I don't see any way to specify a list of sites and rank them by importance. (That'd be handy for the above Treo search--I would put all-Treo sites at the top, followed by general-interest technology sites like PCW.)

If you've got a site of your own that doesn't include site search, trying Google Custom Search is a no-brainer, but you can create search engines even if you don't have a site--here are versions of my PC World Blog Search and TreoSearch that live at Google.

Oh, and it's not just little sites that might want to use a Google Custom Search search engine. In fact, as of today, our sister site Macworld's search is a custom Google engine. Here's a blog item by Macworld editorial director Jason Snell talking about it.

Lately, some new Google offerings have left you wondering what they had to do with Google's core mission (repeat with me: "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful") and not all of them have met Google's traditional bar of inventive practicality. Google Custom Search Engine, however, leaves you (or at least me) saying "How useful--of course Google should be doing this." Give it a look...