Monday, December 21, 2009

This year in Custom Search


The Custom Search team has had a busy 2009. This is the year we turned 3. And now Custom Search is powering many tens of millions of queries a day on millions of small and large websites. We believe that search should be easy to deploy on your website, and, in addition to providing great relevance, should be flexible, customizable and feature-rich. With the help of your suggestions, we hope we are delivering on these goals.

This year, we hit many milestones. Here are some of the key developments:
  • integration with several hosters to bring Custom Search to your doorstep
  • enabled support for rich snippets, giving you more control over presentation of results
  • it's now easier for you to promote specific content to the top of your search results
  • we deployed contextual search within Blogger, Google Sites and Wikipedia
  • automatic transliteration is now integrated into the search box
  • improved results rendering flexibility with the Custom Search Element
  • plug-n-play with themes for enhanced customizability of results look and feel
  • added support for structured metadata and the ability to restrict results by specific attributes
  • we got you ready for the growing population of users searching your websites with mobile devices, such as Android phones, iPhone, iPod Touch, Palm Pre, etc.
And there's so much more to do with Custom Search. We'll be working next year to give you additional metadata support, more results customization, and search features that will make it even easier for your users to find the right information faster on your websites. Your users will be happier and you can focus on more important things.

As always, we're looking at your feedback to guide our efforts. And don't forget to follow us on Twitter. Meanwhile, happy holidays, and we'll see you soon ... in the next decade!