Custom Search now available in Parallels Plesk Panel

Website owners who use Parallels Plesk Panel to manage their hosting and website services can now configure Custom Search and Site Search in a couple of clicks! As announced on the Google Blog, Plesk now offers out-of-box integration with Google Services for Websites.


If you’re one of the millions of webmasters already using Plesk Panel, you can now easily add high-quality search to your websites via the Custom Search page shown above. Since Plesk Panel knows what domains you own, a drop-down list of your domains is conveniently offered for automatic configuration of the search engine, as shown below.


Once you’re done configuring your search engine, you can customize the search experience to match the look and feel of your website. As shown in the screenshot below, Plesk provides links that you can click to directly manage and customize your search engine with the Custom Search control panel -- you will be automatically logged in.


After you decide on the theme and layout for your search, you can get the search code to insert into your website so your users can easily find what they are looking for. Finally, you can also click through from Plesk to access your search statistics. If you want support and more control over advertising, branding, and indexing, you can initiate an upgrade to Site Search right from within Plesk.

We hope this will make it easier for you to manage your site search experience. As always, let us know if you have feedback.

Posted by: Radu Cornea, Software Engineer and Jae Jung, Business Development Manager

Custom data rendering in results

Since the launch of Custom Search, we've been constantly pushing the customization envelope -- allowing users to tweak ranking, provide refinements, add promotions above results, change the look and feel, select from themes and modify layouts.

We did not stop there. We added support for custom synonyms, and the ability for website owners to mark up their content with structured metadata. With structured Custom Search, you can create results with rich snippets, e.g., thumbnails and actions.

Now, through Custom Search data rendering in the element, we’re providing you the ability to completely customize the layout of each result. With simple inline markup on the search page, you can override result attributes, decide how each result is formatted, control the size and location of thumbnails and highlight result metadata.

The screenshot below shows an example of formatted result blocks for a sample search based on data from Scribd -- thumbnails have been reduced in size, and a new line containing metadata, including an icon for document type, has been inserted into the result.

We hope you’ll use the power of data rendering in your own search. For a step by step guide on how you can control the data rendering in results with the Custom Search Element, please read our post on the Search API blog.

Posted by: David Gibson and Nicholas Weininger, Software Engineers

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

Designing the look and feel with XML

If you programmatically create and manage custom search engines, you are probably familiar with the XML format for Custom Search. The context file, which includes the specifications for the search engine, now has a richer look and feel section that lets you define the style of the search box and search results of your custom search engine. You can choose different types of result presentation—from Google hosted results to the Custom Search element—and retrieve the code for the search box that you insert into your webpages.

The Custom Search element gives you the greatest level of control, enabling you to match the look and feel of your search results to the rest of the rest of your website. As shown in the following screenshot, gdgt uses the Custom Search element to match the style of its website.

You can control many attributes in the look and feel. The following is a sample snippet that shows the new LookAndFeel XML element in the Custom Search context file. You can either select a design from a set of predefined themes or control the attributes individually.

<LookAndFeel code="4"
         googlebranding="watermark"
         element_layout="1"
         theme="1"
         custom_theme="true"
         text_font="Arial, sans-serif">
 <Logo/>
 <Colors url="#008000"
         background="#FFFFFF"
         border="#FFFFFF"
         title="#0000CC"
         text="#000000"
         visited="#0000CC"
         title_hover="#0000CC"
         title_active="#0000CC" />
 <Promotions title_color="#0000CC"
         title_visited_color="#0000CC"
         url_color="#008000"
         background_color="#FFFFFF"
         border_color="#336699"
         snippet_color="#000000"
         title_hover_color="#0000CC"
         title_active_color="#0000CC" />
 <SearchControls input_border_color="#BCCDF0"
         button_border_color="#666666"
         button_background_color="#CECECE"
         tab_border_color="#E9E9E9"
         tab_background_color="#E9E9E9"
         tab_selected_border_color="#FF9900"
         tab_selected_background_color="#FFFFFF" />
 <Results border_color="#FFFFFF"
         border_hover_color="#FFFFFF"
         background_color="#FFFFFF"
         background_hover_color="#FFFFFF" />
</LookAndFeel>

All the attributes and child elements of LookAndFeel are documented in the developer guide.

Posted by: Kevin Glumbumble Lim, Technical Writer

Changes to the hosted home page

Most Custom Search users choose to deploy a customized search experience on their own websites, using the inline Custom Search Element or an embedded iframe. However, some users choose to use the home page that we create automatically for every search engine. The hosted home page is also optimized for high-end mobile devices, such as the iPhone, iPod Touch and Android phones like the Droid or the Nexus One. The URL of the hosted home page looks like this:

http://www.google.com/cse/home?cx=013315504628135767172:d6shbtxu-uo

You'll notice that we've made a few minor changes to the hosted home page. You're likely to see more changes to this page in the future as we make new features like themes available for the hosted home page.

You can get to this Google-hosted home page for your search engine from the Custom Search control panel by clicking on the name of your search engine anywhere in your control panel.

As always, we're always looking to get your feedback.

Posted by: Radu Cornea, Software Engineer

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!

Posted by: Rajat Mukherjee for the Custom Search Team