Google Sites turns Custom Search on

Google Sites offers users a very simple way to create and publish web sites. Multiple users can collaborate to manage website content as well as add various gadgets into their websites. Google Sites now allows the addition of Google Custom Search as a search option.

In the following example, we add a Yoga Search Custom Search experience to the Yoga for Life web site in a few simple steps. (The example assumes that the Yoga for Life website is hosted by Google Sites, and that the Yoga Search has already been created using Google Custom Search.)

1. Login to your Google Site, and select the "Manage Site" option in the "More Actions" dropdown.
   
   


2. Select the "Site Layout" option from the Navigation menu on the left. Click the "Configure Search" button.
   
   


3. Select the Advanced tab in the "Configure site search" dialog. To add a new search provider, click on the "Add provider" button.
   
   


4. Now, we'll need to get information about the Custom Search engine we want to use. Open up another tab or browser window and login to the Custom Search control panel. Find the URL for the search engine you want to use by clicking on it's name in the list called My search engines. Copy this URL; you will use it in the next step. In this example, we'll use the URL for Yoga Search.
   
   


5. Go back to the Google Sites search provider dialog. Select "Google Custom Search" as the provider type. Type in the Name, e.g., "Yoga Search" for the search option you'd like your users see on your site, and paste the Custom Search Engine URL that you obtained in the earlier step. Leave the Show results in site option checked. Click OK.
   
   


6. You can change your default provider by clicking on the "General" tab in the "Configure site search" dialog and selecting "Yoga Search". Make sure to Save your settings. You're done.
   
   


7. Your users will see Yoga Search as the default search option in the search box on the Yoga for Life website. Search, and your results from the Yoga Search Custom Search engine will show up inline, with the look and feel of your site.
   
   

Try it out for your site, with your own Custom Search engine! As always, we'd love to hear your feedback on new features in the user group.

Posted by: Scott Johnston, Senior Product Manager, Google Sites and Rajat Mukherjee, Group Product Manager, Search

Product Ideas for Custom Search

Posted by: Christine Moschella, Online Operations

Your feedback is one of the most important things we consider when planning updates and improvements to Google Custom Search. In addition to reviewing the feedback and suggestions that you make in our user group, we're opening up a Product Ideas page for you to share your opinions about Custom Search. Just like other Product Ideas series, you'll be able to submit your own idea and vote for ideas from other users.

If you've got ideas or suggestions for Custom Search - features you want, things we can do better - tell us! We want to hear from you. We've created a set of categories, so please try to find the most appropriate category for your suggestion or idea. Product Ideas for Custom Search will remain open for you for the next month.

If you have questions, visit the Product Ideas FAQ - but if you want to get started right away, go for it! Vote for a suggestion, or enter your own idea on the Custom Search Product Ideas page.

Custom Search with Style like Peanut Butter with Jelly

Posted by: Jeff Scudder, Developer Programs Engineer

Creating a custom look and feel for your website can have significant benefits in everything from improving usability to setting a professional or playful tone for your website. In many cases, letting users search the content of your site and related sites gets them the information they need faster. After all, a speedy user experience is a happy user experience. Here are some examples of how Custom Search and custom styles are as easy (and delicious) as peanut butter and jelly.

We start with a Custom Search Element, which uses the CustomSearchControl to add Custom Search to my web page. If you've never used a Custom Search engine before, I think you'll find a lot to love: it uses Google's search technology to include a specific group of websites for indexing, and you can share in ad revenue.



One of the many benefits of using the AJAX Search APIs to dynamically add search capabilities to your web pages is that you can also control the look and feel of the search input and results by using open web standards like cascading style sheets (CSS). When you combine this styling with Custom Search, you can create a seamless search experience for your users.

You can begin by changing the search input box (dynamically added to your page by default) to use an input box that you've placed on the page wherever you like.

// Set drawing options to use my text box
// as input instead of having the library create one.
var drawOptions = new google.search.DrawOptions();
drawOptions.setInput(document.getElementById('query_input'));

// Draw the control in content div
customSearchControl.draw('results', drawOptions);

With the above changes we get a page that looks like this:

Now that we're able to use a Custom Search box (look ma, no button push required!) we can add CSS rules to change fonts, colors, and more in the search results.

For example, see: http://ajax-apis.appspot.com/cse-style which has CSS rules that effect the styling of the search results and compare it to our first step which uses the default styles.

Take a look at the CSS rules to get an idea for how this works, and how you can do custom styling to fit your own website.

We can change the font and add a border around each search result:

#results .gsc-results {
/* Sets font for titles, snippets, and URLs. */
font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;
}

#results .gsc-result {
position: relative;
border: 1px solid #eee;
border-left: 10px solid #eee;
padding: 8px 8px 8px 20px;
border-radius: 8px;
-webkit-border-radius: 8px;
-moz-border-radius: 8px;
}

We can also change the style of a single result when the user moves the mouse cursor over it:

#results .gsc-result:hover {
border: 1px solid #888;
border-left: 10px solid #888;
}

These are just a couple of examples. Since the CSS styling is handled by the browser, you can use any supported CSS rules to select portions of the search results. For more information on the result HTML structure and the CSS classes you may want to select in your own customizations, see the documentation on styling AJAX Search results.

More transliteration languages for Custom Search

Posted by: Christine Moschella, Online Operations

A few weeks ago, we announced support for transliteration in Custom Search in a bunch of languages, including Arabic and a set of Indic languages. The auto-transliteration feature allows your users to conveniently type in English, for example, and search in one of these languages.

Now, that list of transliteration languages in Custom Search has grown. We now support a dozen languages, including Urdu and Nepali.

The feature is very simple to use: you can turn transliteration on in the Language settings section of the Basics page on the Custom Search control panel.

Once you've enabled automatic transliteration, a language button next to the search box alerts your users. As a user types, the query is transliterated into the selected language in real-time, allowing the user to search in that language.

For more details, read our original transliteration blog post, or search on the Custom Search website!

Here's the current list of supported transliteration languages:

• Arabic
• Bengali
• Gujarati
• Hindi
• Kannada
• Malayalam
• Marathi
• Nepali
• Punjabi
• Tamil
• Telugu
• Urdu

Feel free to share your feedback on transliteration in our forum.

Better search on more websites

Posted by: Radu Cornea, Software Engineer

Earlier this year, we made it easier to add high quality search to your websites by delivering search functionality right to where many of you manage your sites online: your hoster's console. The Custom Search provisioning API allows partners, such as web hosters, to configure search boxes for your site without requiring you to come to Google. This also enabled Custom Search to be added to Google Services for Websites, an offering of useful website tools and services for partners.

Many hosters have enabled Webmaster Tools and Custom Search in their control panels; Aplus.net is the most recent addition to our list of partners that have integrated Custom Search into their service using Google Services for Websites. Aplus.net provides online business services and tools, such as web hosting, domain name registration, web design, and e-commerce services as well as dedicated servers and managed hosting solutions, to small- to medium-sized businesses.

Here's a screenshot of their integration. Websites can enable search with a couple of clicks!


Working with partners such as web hosting providers has made things a great deal easier for webmasters, making useful tools more accessible. Integrating with the right tools will help you analyze your website traffic and improve user retention; Custom Search is a critical element of this, helping people find the right information, products and services quickly.

We are looking forward to enabling more partners to integrate with these important webmaster services. As always, let us know how we can improve our products and services. If you are a web site hoster interested in incorporating Google webmaster services into your platform, check out Google Services for Websites.

Advanced Custom Search Configuration

Posted by: Rajat Mukherjee, Group Product Manager

Here's the presentation on Advanced Custom Search Configuration from Google I/O. You can navigate it with the help of a convenient timeline at YouTube, or download the presentation in PDF format. The talk features Nick Weininger from the Custom Search team on how to create a contextual search experience in minutes, along with details of the Custom Search APIs, including:

• Context and Annotations
• Advanced features, e.g., Promotions, Synonyms and XML results
• RESTful URLs for managing Custom Search engines
• Provisioning API for partners
• Linked Custom Search
• Rich snippets and metadata - pagemaps, microformats and RDFa
• The Blogger search gadget
• The Custom Search Web Element

In addition, Mark Nichoson from Adobe talked about Adobe Community Help, a customized search application that's available within apps in Adobe's Creative Suite 4. Joel Brandt from Adobe followed up with a description of Blueprint, an innovative application that integrates Custom Search into the Flex development environment.

For more information, please check out the Custom Search developer guide.

Automatic transliteration for Custom Search

Posted by: Mohamed Elfeky and Adel Youssef, Software Engineers

Typing is harder in some languages than others! When you're searching for content in a specific language, it is often convenient to think in that language, but type in another, e.g., English.

We've just made this easier to do in Custom Search. We've enabled transliteration in Custom Search for a set of languages, making it easier to find news in Arabic, Indian news in Hindi, your favorite Bollywood song lyrics, or local content in a bunch of other Indic languages - Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu. Other languages will be enabled soon.

The Google Arabia blog recently posted information on Google Ta3reeb, enabling Arabic transliteration in various modes, including within Custom Search.

Here's a screenshot from oneindia.in, a website that has enabled transliteration in a set of Indian languages.

Users can type in English; automatic transliteration converts the query to Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, or Telugu, and helps find relevant content in that language.

Automatic transliteration can now be easily configured in the Custom Search control panel using the Language settings. It will enable conversion of Roman characters to the above languages, allowing users to search for content in these languages. After you turn transliteration on, you can select the specific transliteration languages your users can use.

After enabling transliteration, you can preview your search experience - a language button will show up before the search box, alerting users to the fact that transliteration is enabled, and that they can issue queries in that language while entering the queries in English. In fact, multiple languages can be selected for transliteration. As a query is entered, it is transliterated into the selected language in real-time.

Hit search, and results in the desired language are presented. Voila!

For more information on transliteration, you can check out our help center. As always, we're looking forward to your feedback on our user forum.