Related Podcast Link: Listen to Episode 123!
Not every web site out there has the best search features. Heck, some of the web sites out there don’t have any way to search through them. When you have a web site or resource that you need to search often, trying to use the lame ways the respective owners want you to use is no way to go. Google offers anybody the chance to use their technology to create your own custom search engine.
Step 1 – Visit and Sign In: To get started all you need to do is visit Google’s custom search engine web site. Once there, create a Google account or login to your existing account and your ready to get going.
Step 2 – Lets Get to Creating a Search Engine: Now you should navigate yourself to the “create a new search engine” page. Most of the boxes you fill in explain themselves. When it asks “What do you want to search?” make sure you select “Only sites I select”.
Step 3 – Fill in Your Domains: Now we get to the fun part. In the text box under “Select some sites” type in the domains you want to search. If there is only one – your job is pretty easy. If there are many – you had better get to typing. Here is Google’s advice on how to format your URLs to match how you want to search the domain:
- Individual pages: Specifying www.mysite.com/mypage.html will just include the mypage.html page on www.mysite.com.
- Entire sites: Specifying www.mysite.com/* will include all the pages on www.mysite.com.
- Parts of sites: You can use wildcard patterns to include just certain parts of a site. For example, www.mysite.com/*about* will include only files on www.mysite.com that have about in their name.
- Entire domains: You can also specify an entire domain using *.mydomain.com. If you specify mydomain.com, we will automatically convert this to *.mydomain.com/*. If this is not what you want, you can change it back in the control panel.
Step 4 – Test Out Your New Search Engine: Hit the “Next” button and now you get to play with your new search engine to make sure it works the way you want it to. Finish that up and you have yourself a customized Google search engine that will only search the domains you put into it previously.
Now some might ask why would you want to do this? Here are just a handful of reasons why you might:
- You need an easyier way to search your web host’s support site or forums?
- You want to deliver a better search for your web site’s visitors?
- You want to search all of your favorite “insert subject here” web sites?
Google makes it pretty easy for anybody to make a custom search for any domain or set of domains out there. This is one webmaster tool that just can not be overlooked.
