Hosted Site Search Services Reports

Google Custom Search and Custom Search Business Edition

Google uses the index they've created for the web search engine, and limits by domain name, host, and/or URLs. When someone enters a query in the search form on your site, the Google server application receives the query, formats the results, and sends them back in either HTML or XML (for the business version) with links directly to the pages on your site.

Product Information

See also: Google Search Appliance

Platforms: all Internet-accessible web servers indexed by the Googlebot

Price:free versions

with advertising and limited customization, comes with Web Search radio button. Note that non-profits, government sites and universities can use this version without advertising on request.

Paid versions:

many more options, no advertising, $100 per year for up to 5,000 pages, $500 per year for up to 50,000 pages (limited to 250,000 queries per year) and $15,000 per year for up to one million pages. Other configurations available from Google Sales cse-sales@google.com

Features

• Finding Content
  • Can include multiple sites (unlimited pages in the non-business version)
  • Only those pages within the Google search index are available, no promises about additional indexing.
  • No access to pages secured by passwords or other access control.
  • Updates to new versions of pages when the Google search index updates (no daily or weekly updating).
  • Powerful robot crawler can handle most kinds of links
• Indexing
  • Handles file formats: HTML, XML, text, PostScript, RTF, PDF, Lotus, MacWrite, MS Word, Excel, and PowerPoint
  • Excellent character set and language recognition for best tokenization
  • Does not store the contents of meta tags or page properties.
• Querying
  • Defaults matching all words in the query, case-insensitively
  • Uses the Google query language, including Internet Query Operators - (minus) and "" (quotes) , along with OR and various field names and other parameters.
  • Optional Safe Search for eight languages (Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese (Brazilian), Spanish, Traditional Chinese)
  • Light pluralization using an internal wordlist rather than stemming
• Retrieval
  • Retrieves all matching pages (though the CSE doesn't say how many that is)
  • Shows spellchecker "did you mean?" for misspelled and mistyped words, but they may not have any match on a particular site or set of sites, so it can be a dead end.
  • Search results can have "Refinements", zones based on URLs which appear as links along the top of the results
  • Search Suggestions appear using the "subscriptions" mechanism, which is quite poorly documented
• Relevance
  • Relevance ranking uses all the Google algorithms, including PageRank
  • Adjusting relevance weight can only be done via an XML "background label" and "boost" process
• Results UI
  • Default looks like the Google web search results.
  • Can display interface in English, French, Spanish, German, Bulgarian, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Swedish.
  • Hides duplicate pages based on snippet similarity
  • Page size and cache link seem to appear or not appear randomly
  • Basic results page customization: logo, text and link colors
  • Option to use JavaScript and show results in an iframe (not well documented)
  • Option to request XML results and use a scripting language or presentation program to show them.
• Search Analytics and reports
  • Shows traffic by hour, day, week, month or "overall" (since installing the search service)
  • Shows most popular queries in the same time periods, with links to the queries and flags on no match (zero results) with details.
  • Note: report periods for low-traffic search installations may end the previous Saturday, even for daily and weekly reports.
• Administration
  • All admin done via web
  • Option to allow "contributors" who can edit the URLs to be included or excluded, and annotate them with any refinement labels that you have created, but not otherwise change the search engine.
    
    
• Business Edition (CSBE) features
• No advertising
• Google logo ("branding") not required
• XML results option - allowing flexible display customization
  • XML specification
  • Java example project
• Technical support by email, and for larger customers, an option for paid telephone support

Note: Different results, Google CSE vs. Google.com

A support document (cached copy) for the Google CSE and CSBE notes that some results may be different than those found in the same search on Google.com. It attributes this to including more than three sites in the CSE, and says that the CSE is using a subset of the Google.com index.

They recommend limiting the CSE to three sites, changing the behavior to 'Search the entire web but emphasize included sites', or adding refinements that have the same effect.

As of August 16, 2007, the support note says "We're working to bring more complete results to all Custom Search Engines."

Articles & Reviews

• Google Launches Site Search Service for Business InfoToday, July 30, 2007, by Avi Rappoport
  In-depth discussion of the service, description of features, comparisons with other services, and three examples of sites using the service.
  
  
• Google launches Custom Search Business Edition starting at $100/year ars technica, July 19, 2007, by Jacqui Cheng
  A good overview of the release information.
  
  
• Google introduces Custom Search Business Edition CMS Watch, July 18, 2007 Adriaan Bloem
  Good analysis of how the service fits into the Google services line, and its features and limitations.
  
  
• Google to Launch Vertical Search Engine in a Box Andy Steggles' Blog, July 16, 2007
  A description of the services and its implementations by a developer who added it to the HolidayHomeRental.com web site.
  
  
• NEC Selects Google to Provide Search Services on Japan's Leading BIGLOBE Portal Site Press Release, December 19, 2000
  Google will provide both web and site search services to NEC's BIGLOBE portal site and related online properties.

Examples

• HolidayHomeRental.co.uk - home rental site had a database search interface, and uses Google CSBE as a full-text flexible alternative.
• Justia.com - several hundred thousand legal articles
• Total Training Network - relatively simple site
• University of California, Berkeley - large educational public web search

Search the SearchTools.com Site with the Google CSE

• CSE as of 2007:

• 2001 version of the search service:

Search WWW Search www.searchtools.com

Test of the Google Subscription Button: