Google is an excellent search engine. There’s no doubt about that. But what if you could tailor it to create a custom search engine with the same capabilities as the standard Google?
Google Custom Search Engine in the answer. This powerful tool lets you build a completely customized search engine based on Google. You can give it a name, add a description, set its language and specify which sites you want to search. In this way you can create custom search engines for a group of websites about a certain topic, your most frequently used resources for Photoshop tricks or a given blog network, to name a few examples. In this case, I’m creating a search engine for all the blogs in the OnSoftware network:
As you can see, creating a customized version of Google is just a question of filling in a simple web form and hardly takes a couple of minutes. Custom Search Engine is a free, ad-based service, but if you’d prefer not to see ads on results you can upgrade to a Business account starting at $100 per year. The ads are quite unobtrusive though.
After creating your custom search engine, you’ll be able to access the search engine control panel at any time and modify or update your personal search engine’s settings: basic configuration, refinements, look and feel, statistics and more. What’s more, you can use the custom search engine to make money by linking it to your Google AdSense account.
