Synonyms made easy

The Custom Search team is always working to provide more relevant results, and improving user queries is a big part of that goal. We've shown you how to create refinement labels for queries and create custom synonyms for your search engine. We have been working to improve the ease of management of these features.

Today, we're excited to announce that we've made it easier than ever for Custom Search and Site Search administrators to enable advanced synonym options. Now, you can add sets of synonyms specific to your website content and can also trigger search expansion, so that a query automatically triggers results for synonymous terms.

Google already has a large body of synonym data for general search terms, and since Custom Search lets you harness many of the search features of Google.com, you shouldn't bother replicating this functionality. Instead, focus on adding synonyms for queries specific to your website.

It's easy for you to add synonyms to your accounts; simply log into the control panel and add or delete search terms you want to trigger the synonym expansion. Or, if you have a large number of terms to add, you can create an XML file and quickly upload that to your account.

You can add up to 500 variants for each search engine. For more information you can check out the Custom Search API documentation.

As shown above, there's a new Synonyms link on the control panel. Try it out on your search engine.

Posted by: Tianyu Wen, Software Engineer

Creating standalone search results pages with the element

With the launch of Custom Search themes, you have the ability to select from among a set of result styles, as well as decide on the layout for the search box and search results. Specifically, we offer commonly-used layouts: full-width (search box and search results together), 2-column (search box and search results in separate areas of the webpage), and compact (perfect for search widgets on a page, as well as for mobile search results). These layouts all provide an in-line search experience so that users don’t need to leave the page they are currently on.

Some webmasters, however, prefer to have the search results show up on a different page from the search box, so we wanted to let you know how to do this. We have a detailed post on the AJAX API blog with specific instructions.

As always, let us know if you have other questions we can answer.

Posted by: Jeff Scudder, Developer Programs Engineer