As of January, 2012, this site is no longer being updated, due to work and health issues

Hosted Site Search Services Reports

Google Custom (Free) and Site (Paid) Search Services

Google uses the tools 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 browser sends the form information to the Google server. Google looks for matching pages in the index, filters them to the pages on your site, sorts them by relevance, formats the results, and sends them back in an HTML page with links directly to the pages on your site. They use the buzzword "cloud" for this functionality.

For enterprise search products see the Google Search Appliance

Free Custom Search Engine (CSE)
Includes advertising (AdWords) and offers limited customization.
Non-profits, government sites and universities can use this version without advertising on request.

Paid Site Search Engine (SSI)

This includes more options including comprehensive XML access, more consistent numbers of results, and no advertising option (even if you want ads).

Price per year pages indexed queries per year on-demand index
per day
$100

1,000

250,000 250 pages
$250
5,000 250,000 1000 pages
$750
25,000 500,000 2,500 pages
$2000
100,000 500,000 5,000 pages
contact Google for additional information

Features

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

Examples

 

Search the SearchTools.com Site with the Google CSE

2011 iframe

Custom Search

Load search results on the same page (CustomSearch AJAX API)

The new Custom Search Element is particularly good for blogs and wikis, where users can't upload any pages. However, configure or change it at all requires a knowledge of JavaScript and AJAX (for more information, see my Google CSE AJAX Decoded and CSE CSS pages).

Loading gcse object

Note: the AJAX API will only return 8 results per page and 8 pages for a total of 64 results. Clicking on the "More results" link will display the remainder of the results on a Google-hosted results page.


2008 - opens results in a Google-hosted page

Custom Search - hosted

2008 - opens results in an iframe page (includes site header and other navigation)

Custom Search

2007 - opens results in a new Google-hosted page


2001 - opens results in a Google-hosted page

Google
Search WWW Search www.searchtools.com


Just a test of the Google Subscription Button:

Page Updated: 2007-08-20