Did you know that Google has a product to create customized search
engine with or without programming knowledge? Earning upto 51% share on
revenue generated from Ad clicks?
What is Google CSE?
Google custom search engine (Formerly known as Google Co-op) is a platform
to create your own search engine for free with or without any technical
knowledge launched in 2006.
According to
Wikpedia page on Google Custom Search, with right combination of websites included and prioritized could offer
better topical search results than the Standard Google Search.
All Google CSE which are monetized comes under Google Search Network ( We
ran experiment with 10 Google CSEs and found that CPC in each Google
custom search engines are different based on user engagement and sites
allowed in search engines)
Whats the Benefit of using Google CSE?
Google CSE could act as excellent internal search engine- which not only
through Titles and content but also identifies synonyms to identify right
articles for the search term within the site
You could monetize the searches with Ads and get 51% of the share on each
click (Under Google Adsense, Which is lesser compared to Banner Ads in
site which fetches 68% share)
CPCs (Cost per Click for Ads) in Google CSE are actually very Good and few
times comes close to CPCs in Google Search depending on the user
engagement (But remember you get only 51%)
But why some ads which comes in Google doesn’t show up in my search engine?
and what about product listing ads,UAC and dynamic ads?
It depends on the advertiser, some advertisers do not want to show ads in
search partners, while some do.
Other types of ads are generally not shown in custom search engines unless
it gets good traffic.
What’s special about Google CSE?
- Custom design
- Can be implemented in any website
You can choose the websites to be shown or blocked in search engine
You can promote many websites for many keywords, it’ll be shown to users
even while they’re typing the query and as special first result.
Search by freshness of the post ( search by date) is supported
You can add any tabs ( Just like Shopping, Images tab on Google) if you
can code it.
Why is Google creating it’s own competitor with Google CSE? Isn’t that a
bad move?
No, Google might be thinking in the other way keeping in mind the CPC
rates in the future, custom search engines can help in acquiring new
advertisers who cannot compete with biggies in Google Search , Google
might lose a bit of its share in this case, but still rules without
competition.
Morever Google can actually get what people are searching for within few
Popular sites while they’re not searching for the term directly in Google
Getting Started with Google CSE
Login to
Google Custom Search Engine
Decide and Enter the list of Websites that needs to be part of your
search engine as well as the name of your search engine.
Here you can add either full domain or restricted to single page too
On the next page, your search engine will be ready and Google gives the
code to implement in website as well as Public URL on the Search engine
and control panel to further customize your search engine.
On the Customization Front, Its pretty much plug and play unless you want
to customize your search engine to granular level
Setup
- Add keywords, Description to your search engine
- Options for Image search and Safe Search
Search Engine Regions, Languages, API Access, Website and Knowledge
Graph Exclusions
- Option to Search the entire Web with your search engine
Look and Feel
- Layout & Themes
- Option to disable thumbnail
Option to add logo and choose colors of everything inlcluding URL and
snippet that appears
Search Features
-
Promotions: You can choose to promote
any site for any queries (This is not considered as an ad in search
engine)
-
Refinements in Search: You can add
entities or labels the site should contain for prioritization in search
results
-
Auto complete: You can include/exclude
patterns/words for sponsored auto suggestions. Eg: Including Course
would would prioritize course in autosuggestion for relevant searches…
while user types data science, data science course would be first
autosuggestion
-
Synonyms: You can manually add synonyms
to help search engine understand and refine its searches better
Advanced Refinements:
-
Sorting the results: Results can be sorted by date, Relevance by
the user. In addition to this, Search engines can be customized to sort
results based on other keys like Page Maps (More like Additional
Sitelinks which is applicable only in Search partners and not Google
Search), Rich snippets (Ratings and Reviews Markup) or Meta tags
(Keywords for page- No longer considered as ranking metric in Google
Search)
- Refinements as tabs/links,
- Results Browsing History: Should search engine save info and allow user to come back to search after he exits the website,
- Should there be Structured data in results,
- No Results String: Default text to display when there are no results
- Link target: Should the website link opened in same or different tab?
- Query addition: Query which gets appended to query searched by user
- Web & Image search Restricts:
- Language Restrictions
- Result Size: Number of results per page
-
Sort by: Date or relevance- Recommended to keep it relevance by
default
- As Sitesearch: Restrict search results to a specific site
-
Extra Query Terms: That will be added with Query by Logical OR
-
Filtering: To automatically filter results that look similar
Default to Image Search: Enabling which makes default search results to
be Image search
Are there Other Products similar to Google CSE?
Custom Search Ads: Custom Search Ads are displaying ads in search
results within your site while keeping your search engine the same
Custom Search Engines: The Whole search Engine will be from Google side
Both of the Products give the same 51% revenue share for Ads and supports
the below 4 ASQs (Alternative Search Queries).
As per Google’s Official page on ASQs , Alternative Search Queries
(ASQs) are any means of triggering search results (search engine results
page or SERP) other than a user entering a query in a search box. The
query text that generates the SERP can be used to request Google Custom
Search Ads (CSA) within the guidelines on this page.
- Popular Search: ASQ generated for most common text searches inside the site
-
Suggested Search: Similar to Autosuggestion on Google Search
-
Related Search: Similar to Related Searches in Google Search
-
Category Browse: Category or sub category links in Menu can be replaced by ASQ
In addition to these, Google actually have two CSE (Programmable Search Engine
and Regular CSE), Programmable Search Engine has additional options to
customize your search engine by your own code.
