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The Magic of Google's Custom Search

September 4th, 2007

(Cross-posted at the Ancient Wisdom Productions Blog).

If you've ever made a website, you've probably come across the problem of Search.

Specifically, searching. As in your site. If you're like us, however, and develop lots of sites, each one with a different layout, needs, budget, underlying technology, etc., then searching becomes an even bigger problem.

Let's be honest, some sites don't exactly need a search function. If you have a total of five pages up on the web, a visitor is going to find what they're looking for sooner or later. But it's still a nice function. And who knows? Maybe your visitor isn't willing to waste precious seconds browsing. They want that magic box that returns exactly what they're looking for on the first try.

Given minimal thought, Search is a very difficult problem. Especially when it comes to the order in which to return results, correct spelling mistakes, treat duplicate functions, and so forth. Granted, with the introduction of MySQL 4.1, a more robust database query function was put forth, that attempted to determine relevancy by the number of times a specific query appeared in the text, but that's a relatively rudimentary solution.

Luckily, smart people have spent far longer on the question of Search than most of us. Exemplified by the benevolent graces of Google.

So sure, Google's great for searching the web, but it's also very easy to harness Google's search power and restrain it to your own website, even keeping the search results safely within your own layout.

The magic of this comes in the form of Google's Custom Search, a free utility that is strikingly easy to use. By going to the previous link, you can set up a search engine that will search the contents of your site within minutes. You merely provide it with the base address of your site and an asterisk denoting any and all pages within (for example: http://www.ancientwisdompro.com/* ). Far more customizations are possible, but I'll leave that to you and Google's decent documentation to work out.

The key now is how to integrate this custom search into your site. Google gives you a couple of options. Since I prefer as much control as possible, I want to integrate the search results into a page I've already created on my website. You can call it search.htm or whatever you'd like. The key is once you create your custom search engine, you access your Google Custom Search control panel, and select the option, "Code." If you scroll down a little ways, you'll see a section called, "Search box and search results code for your website."

This is the magic section! First, select your search box layout. Then type in the address of your search page that you designate to return results (i.e. http://www.yourdomain.com/search.htm). Now all you have to do is cut and paste the two resulting sections of Javascript code: one for the search box, the other for the search result, into your page. That's it. You now have a robust, fast, paginated, too-clever-by-half, search tool for your website.

You can see an example at by looking at the Ancient Wisdom Custom Search. if you view the source of the page, you'll see the two sections of javascript, and that's it. Now all you have to do is savor the sweet, sweet Google search results, customized to your very site. The ads are, unfortunately, unavoidable, unless your site represents a non-profit entity. Otherwise, you can at least sign up to make some money off of those things, so why complain?

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