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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