Google Custom Search
Have you heard of Google custom searches? It’s a really neat way to add usability to your website. You just sign in with your Google account, give your search engine a name and description, add some keywords and then sites to be searched. For instance you can search the Collins College site and find only terms found on that site. Want to know more about a site? Type it in the search. Collins College is a community college that has campuses in Tempe and Phoenix, Arizona. Their degree programs are in design, media and technology. Just type in “courses” and you get a list of pages similar to what you would find on a regular Google search- except all pages point to one site. Also, on this particular site, you’ll see that there are no ads.
You’ve got to pay attention, though, to how you put in the urls for your site search. Formatting the website is explained:
Formatting your URLs
* Individual pages: Specifying www.mysite.com/mypage.html will just include the mypage.html page on www.mysite.com.
* Entire sites: Specifying www.mysite.com/* will include all the pages on www.mysite.com.
* Parts of sites: You can use wildcard patterns to include just certain parts of a site. For example, www.mysite.com/*about* will include only files on www.mysite.com that have about in their name.
* Entire domains: You can also specify an entire domain using *.mydomain.com. If you specify mydomain.com, we will automatically convert this to *.mydomain.com/*. If this is not what you want, you can change it back in the control panel.
This service is still in beta and come in Standard Edition- which is free, but comes with ads that you can use to monetize your search results- or the Business Edition - which costs $100 a year, but comes with no ads on the results page.
Check out the faqs and see if it’s right for you.
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