Adding Google Search to your website not only provides your readers with a powerful search engine that crawls your site content, but also makes some earning possible by integrating Adsense for Search. Here’s a quick guide into setting up a Google Custom Search Engine on your website.
What is Google Custom Search Engine (CSE)?
In letting you add a search box to your website without incurring cost on your part, Google gives you one option, through its Custom Search Engine (CSE). Google CSE is a fully customizable search engine that allows you to prioritize or restrict search results based on websites and pages that you specify. You can custom fit it to your site’s design and structure as well as apply your website’s look and feel to the search results pages. It also allows you to give your users search refinement settings, add sites to your index and invite friends to co-edit and contribute to your Google-powered search engine. And if you want to take it a step further, Google Custom Search Engine also lets you earn some revenue through Google’s AdSense Program. That is, search results on your CSE will display not only relevant search results from your site, but AdSense link units tied up to your AdSense account as well.
Creating Your Google Custom Search Engine
First, make sure that you are prepared with the following information:
Your search engine’s name - you can be as creative as you like with this one. As much as possible if you want it to adapt to your website, use your website’s branding.
Search engine description - you might also want to consider preparing a short description about your search engine, so that your user will know what type of information they could get from your search engine. Specify the sites that will be indexed and crawled by your search engine so that users will not expect too much from it only to get disappointed later on.
List of websites you want to include - prepare a list of websites that you want to be crawled by the search engine that you are creating. Specify URLs of these websites in valid format.
With that settled, click on this link and enter the information we asked you to prepare. Once you’re done you can save your custom search engine and you will be brought to your Custom Search Engine Control Panel where you can apply some more tweaks to your Google search engine.
Adding Google Search to Your Site
From your Custom Search Engine control panel, click on the link that says “get code” located at the left side navigation of the page. Copy the codes presented and paste it in the page where you want it to appear on your website. Usually this should be added to your website’s home page.
What’s next? Actually that’s pretty much into it. Once you’ve added the code to your website, you can start using it or tell the world that you now have Google search on your website.
Or if you want to spice it up some more, you can refine its look and feel some more, or run a Google AdSense account.
