Create a Google coop custom search and connect to an Adsense account |
Google keeps trying to inspire everyone to use their search engine for everything, including their newest product: creating a Google coop search which has Techcrunch saying:
For bloggers, using Google Co-op may be a better choice than the built in search feature. A search engine can be created that searches just a single site, and Google search is generally better than search features included with blog software
We’ve been using Google search for our Virtual TO Reality group blogging effort and to date have been disappointed. I created a Google Coop search this morning and tied into the Adsense hoping to see better results, but there doesn’t appear to be any improvement. Our group’s long term plan is to move the site to Wordpress and our domain and use the built-in site search instead.
Let others collaborate on your custom site search
A curious feature Google coop offers is the ability to add collaborators to your custom site search. In theory this means the bloggers in our group could add other site searches related to virtual reality and Massive Multiplayer Online sites to make a more useful custom search engine as well as use the Google Marker to annotate included pages. I’m looking forward to sharing this feature with the group this coming Friday and see what they think and what our group can do to improve the overall search result.
Problogger Darren is soliciting his readers to add family friendly sites to his custom search. The light yellow color scheme for the search results is hard on the eyes, Darren, if you happen to read this feedback. I clicked on the volunteer button and it seemed to do nothing. Maybe a message was sent to him to approve me? Terrible UI response. When you click on links something should always happen. Send me to a page or pop a message that indicates the information has been successfully submitted. Call me a name. Do something besides blink the page as if nothing happened. Bad Google.
Add Adsense to your custom coop search
Once you create a custom search by filling out a short form (pictured above), you need to go to the coop site search control panel and choose “make money” to link the custom search to your Adsense account. Here are instructions on managing Google coop.
You’ll need the email address, zip code and last five digits of the phone number from the Adsense account to link (pictured above).
Who will benefit from custom site searches?
The collaboration feature aside, I’m not sure what readers in a real world sense will benefit from this search. If you have a good working example for readers of a Google coop custom site search, feel free to share in the comments below. I can see the benefit to the owners of the search, but that’s not what search is supposed to be about. Give me a search engine that helps me find what I’m looking for, not one that lines somebody’s pockets.
Om Malik thinks Google should pay more to micro search builders:
The emphasis here should be on getting more and more people to build these specialized micro search engines. Mike Arrington is not going to waste his time for peanuts, but make it a good deal, and I bet he can build what could be the most accurate Web 2.0 only search engine.
Individually I’m not very motivated to build a micro search engine for a third party service, although I definitely see the value in a group collaborating to build a niche search engine. From a webmaster and reader perspective I’d rather have something more integrated than less. With this in mind I’m curious if one can use the Google AJAX API to integrate a Google coop search into a site? Anybody try this out yet?
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Upon checking this out, three features stood out:
1) You can exclude sites that you do not want in the results
2) You can easily do so using the Google Marker
3) Anyone can volunteer to help
So we decided to throw up an experiment to encourage everyone to mark spam sites to be excluded from search results.
Working together as a community we may be able to radically improve the quality of the search results (or perhaps just get in a blacklisting war?)
The result is Putch - putch.com
Comment by Putch — October 24, 2006 @ 9:54 am PST
Interesting group effort, Putch. As I wrote above, I’m definitely interested in the collaborative possibilities.
Comment by TDavid — October 24, 2006 @ 10:01 am PST
Wait, putch, I just saw the exact same comment posted here on Techcrunch. Are you crossposting the same comment to multiple blogs? That’s very spammy behavior and definitely not appreciated or desired. Ironic considering the goals of your project …
Comment by TDavid — October 24, 2006 @ 10:26 am PST
TDavid - Thank you for the words of encouragement in your first comment. As to your second comment, yes, there have been on-topic comments made on a variety of blogs to plant the Putch seed in different communities so as to foster a broader range of feedback and participation.
Comment by Putch — October 24, 2006 @ 12:50 pm PST
Thanks for the persoalized follow-up, Putch. I’m cool with the original post, it just struck me negatively when after approving it I saw the exact same (promotional) comment elsewhere. With all due respect, if you want to plant seeds you probably should take the extra thirty seconds and switch up the text in future messages of that type nature. If you want to get personal feedback and participation you start by being personal, not mass mailish, that’s all I’m saying. I asked for examples and was interested to see yours and then it made me feel like I got duped when I saw the same comment completely unpersonalized elsewhere.
Best of luck with your project
Comment by TDavid — October 24, 2006 @ 2:40 pm PST
TDavid- Understood. Thanks again!
Comment by Putch — October 24, 2006 @ 4:22 pm PST
I find google’s search on a website more then disappointing. To be honest I’d rather implement my own search in my website or web application and if I want I can display ads in there my self. Another problem is that when I click search on a website I don’t expect to be sent to google. In fact I hate it. I gives the impression on a small spammy site with no content. And that is not just my impression.
As for making a custom search for other websites…why in the world do we need that? Am I the only one that doesn’t feel the need to use it? Why? To exclude your compentition? Neah….people don’t google from your website anyway.
Comment by Bitstar — December 10, 2008 @ 5:11 am PST
Bitstar - a custom search with a collection of sources surrounding specific topics used by __ site could be useful to both the operators of that site and readers interested in knowing the pool from which material is generated from as a source. In the real world example stated in the post, our group covers virtual worlds, MMO and social games. A search engine that only uses sources covering these niches is handy. Would it be better if it didn’t look like Google? Sure.
Of course a tool like Y! Pipes could be used instead.
I agree with all your other points about using a custom search on a single site though. Check out our search here for example. It’s got some neat site-specific features and is not powered by Google (although there is the ability to view Google results in a separate pane beside results here).
Comment by TDavid — December 10, 2008 @ 5:18 am PST