As of January, 2012, this site is no longer being updated, due to work and health issues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.
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
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Robot crawling on web sites
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The same googlebot spider used by the main Google Web Search can handle most kinds of links and pages.
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Can follow HTTPS links
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Some overlap with Google Web Search index
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Can include multiple sites, up to paid limit
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The Free Custom Search Engine was designed as a cooperative vertical search tool, so it has no exact limits on the numbers of pages or sites.
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On-demand indexing can crawl specified pages every 24 hours (see above for limits)
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Can use a sitemap to access unlinked or very deep URL paths
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Can't read pages secured by passwords or other access control in either version.
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Indexing
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Good character set and language recognition
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Option to transliterate from one script to another: mainly to Roman (which covers English, Spanish, and other Western European languages) from Arabic and several Indic character sets
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Stores documents full text, title, URL text and anchor text for incoming links
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Does not store the contents of meta tags or page properties.
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Reads text from many file formats: HTML, XML, text, PostScript, Acrobat PDF, Autodesk, Google Earth, Shockwave Flash, RTF, MS Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. It may also index Lotus Notes, Wordperfect and MacWrite files.
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Querying
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Converts words to lower-case form before indexing and searching
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Default: retrieves only pages matching every word in the query
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Shows "did you mean?" for misspelled and mistyped words
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This is not always in sync with the sites being searched, so it can make suggestions that find no matches after the users click
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Supports Google Advanced Search features,
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"" (quotes) for phrase searching
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- (minus) for excluding pages containing following search terms
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OR for synonym searching
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More options
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Optional "Safe Search" for eight languages (Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese (Brazilian), Spanish, Traditional Chinese)
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Retrieval
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Site Search version matches pages just like the main Google Web Search
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The number and CSE results often vary from the main search
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Search results can have "Refinements", based on pre-built query filers, which appear as tabs or links along the top of the results. These are not facets, as they are not
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Search Suggestions appear using the "subscriptions" mechanism, which is quite poorly documented
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Notes:
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The CSE does not display a total number found
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The search results page numbers at the bottom of the page may be misleading
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Relevance
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Relevance ranking uses all the Google algorithms, including PageRank
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Adjusting relevance weight can only be done via an XML "background label" and "boost" process
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Results UI
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Default looks like the Google web search results.
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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.
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Hides duplicate pages based on snippet similarity
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Page size and cache link seem to appear or not appear randomly
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Basic results page customization: logo, text and link colors
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Option to use JavaScript and show results in an iframe (not well documented)
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Option to request XML results and use a scripting language or presentation program to show them.
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Search Analytics and reports
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Shows traffic by hour, day, week, month or "overall" (since installing the search service)
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Shows most popular queries in the same time periods, with links to the queries and flags on no match (zero results) with details.
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Note: report periods for low-traffic search installations may end the previous Saturday, even for daily and weekly reports.
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Administration
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All admin done via web
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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.
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Site Search, Paid Version
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This was formerly known as the Custom Search Engine Business Edition (CSBE)
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No advertising
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Google logo ("branding") not required
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XML results option - allowing flexible display customization
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
Search the SearchTools.com Site with the Google CSE
2011 iframe
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).
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
2008 - opens results in an iframe page (includes site header and other navigation)
2007 - opens results in a new Google-hosted page
2001 - opens results in a Google-hosted page
Just a test of the Google Subscription Button:
Page Updated: 2007-08-20