Build Your Own Google
October 24th, 2006 by pamela
Wouldn’t it be great if you could custom build a search engine for your website quickly and easily, focusing on all the things that are important to your company? Well Google have heard your cries and have launched Google Co-op, a customised search engine service which allows users to create a search engine containing specific websites only.
This is a great step forward for Google as this service really does allow anyone to build a custom search engine, which is pretty cool. There are plenty of options for customisation too which make it easy to make the engine highly targeted and entirely relevant to your site.
You can search only the sites you chose, including only the pages you want, of which there can be millions if you like. You can also decide how the content should be prioritised, whether anyone else can contribute to the index, and what the search results looks like.
You can choose to have the results opened in Google, or in an i-frame if you want the results to open in your own site, giving you the opportunity to really make the results look like an integrated part of your site.
As you would expect from a Google product Google Co-op is easy to use, apparently taking ‘a matter of minutes’ to set up. No programming know how is needed and it’s all free. There is also the option to use the custom engine as a revenue source via Google Adsense.
Matt Cutts has reviewed Google Co-op and he’s pretty impressed with it. It certainly has great potential for many client sites and blogs and could help towards sites achieving authority status for their chosen topics.
Let me know if you have any thoughts.
October 31st, 2006 at 2:32 pm
The world according to OUR version of Google - now no one is wrong., its a great idea,
Well I suppose it was inevitable that Google would commercialise Yahoos thinking.
Essentially this is a great idea, but a whole concept has to addressed and understood. Clients still think of being “number 1″ on a search result. In years to come this will mean less and less as everyones perception of the results become more “personalised”.
Didn’t they do this to the bible years ago - different versions for different tribes, so everyone felt justified.
And that just worked out great didn’t it!
Watch this space.