5 Reasons to Leverage Google's Custom Search

More and more each day you probably see Google's custom search engine functionality appear on site's across the Internet. In fact, I have implemented the Google custom search engine on two of my own sites. If you are looking for a simple way to enhance your users' engagement level on your site then I recommend you take a closer look at Google custom search engine. Below are few of the top reasons I like it so much:

Giving users what they are used to: More than half the world prefers Google's search results and are comfortable interacting with the search box as well as the search results. Google Custom search engine provides the exact same search experience as Google.com but on YOUR site.
Building your own search engine is difficult: Have you ever tried designing your own site search functionality, it's definitely not simple. It's difficult to apply the same type of algorithms Google does so that you can sort your results smarter than just alphabetically. With the custom search engine the algorithms are applied for you and you gain all the benefits of the awesome performance.
Access to deeper content: Many sites on the Internet have some of their best content buried deep within their folder structure, the custom search engine allows your users to find that deep content within 1 click without getting frustrated and abandoning your site.
Access to new content, not a huge issue anymore: One previous draw back of Google Custom Search vs. a proprietary search was that Google took a little while longer to index newer content which made a given site's internal search results not as fresh. However, with the recent changes, your new content can be made available quicker by leveraging Google's XML sitemaps.
Customization: Google Custom Search Engine allows you to customize your configuration in many different ways including: look and feel of results, style of search box, placement of ads, sites to search within, ability to introduce AdSense, method of displaying results and refinement labels for popular website topics.

Comments (5)

Creating your own custom search engine is not only difficult but again as rightly pointed out is not going to be as good in bringing out results as Google.

And its always better to have a Google Search Engine working on your website gives a PRO look to the website.

No need to reinvent the wheel I'd say.

Mark
Editor
http://www.212articles.com

Posted by: Mark White on May 26, 2008

For me it was an easy choice to introduce a search utility into a test concept based on the dual meaning of surfing and surfing the internet. Add Google AdSense and Analytics, and now I have a data engine for plotting my next move. No brainer.

Posted by: KG on May 27, 2008

I've used it and it's okay.
I hate that you have to wait for Google to reindex the site instead of being able to direct your site to be reindexed. Especially since my clients are paying for the service!

Posted by: LC on May 31, 2008

Hi LC,

Actually, if you update your Google XML Sitemap with your new pages they will begin to showup in your internal results before they are indexed in the regular Google Search results.

See: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/05/sitemaps-offer-better-coverage-for-your.html

Posted by: Manoj on June 2, 2008

Also can you not monetise from Google's web results?

Posted by: Adaptiv Media on June 15, 2008

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