Creating your own Google Search Engine
Shame on me, I’ve been rather quiet (two weeks since the last post). Frankly, I’ve been avoiding the blog because don’t really like writing “how-to’s”.
Time to get the monkey off my back, and take you through the steps. I’ll avoid advanced details. If you’re that interested, the documentation is pretty accessible. Creating a Custom Search Engine (CSE) takes all of ten minutes to “do” once you know what it is you want to create. There’s four simple steps
Step 1: Login to Google and get yourself a new CSE
Step 2: Add refinements
Step 3: Polish the look and feel
Step 4: Add contributors (super cool feature)
Depending on what you need, Step 1 might be enough.
Create new CSE
- Visit the Google CSE homepage and login (create an account if you don’t already have one).
- Press the big blue button to start the creation process (or hit this link).
- Enter the basic search engine details (name, description). Enter keywords which the CSE can use to train itself.
- Select the desired CSE scope and the sites you wish to have indexed
- Try out your CSE before saving
Enter the CSE control panel, to continue customising your search.
Refine the search
At this stage, you’ve done all you need for a basic CSE. It’s all I’ve done to the Law firm search or KM search.
From there you can improve your search engine in several ways.
First you can add refinements, which “push” certain terms into a search. For example, I may want to create an Enterprise 2.0 refinement which adds ‘Wikis’, ‘blogs’ and ’social software’ to a search. To do this, go to the Refinements tab, click the 
button, and add the terms as below.
Once you’ve done this, go to the Sites tab you can make the refinements prefer some sites over others:
Polish the look and feel
There’s two components to the look and feel. The first is just about colours and branding. The second relates to embedding the search within your website.
- First decide how you want the box to look
- Then, customise the results by selecting the colours you’d like
- Finally, add a logo to the page (should you choose to do so)
To embed the search within your website, you’ll need somebody with just the slightest of coding skills.
Go to the Code tab and decide where you want to host the engine (the CSE is hosted on Google by default and won’t go away if you decide to put the search on your server). Enter the address of the search results page on your server.
Decide what to do with advertisements (get the business edition to turn them off).
From there, just drop the search box and search results code onto your website. At KnowledgeThoughts we’ve put them both on the same page.
Add contributors
This is where the nerd in me gets a little too excited (sad I know). On the Collaboration tab you can send invites to your colleagues, allowing them to contribute sites and refinements. It’s compelling, because it could be used by a practice to build up a custom search across the sites the value most.
Phew… that was really long (and probably rife with spelling/grammar mistakes).
