Custom Search Engine & Google Ajax Search a winning combination?

In a previous post I explained how to set-up a simple search using Google Ajax and Custom Search engine it wasn’t pretty but was simple well several weeks later we have started to implement a more complete solution on the Venture Skills main web site. To see it in action click here

The search box searches our custom search engine which includes this site, our main site and others that are part of Venture Skills network you can see this engine here but its not very pretty either. So what have been the changes and challenges

Google Custom Search

Since the original post we have had to adapt our search engine to exclude directories particularly on wordpress to stop duplicate content.
If your using wordpress systems you may wish to exclude the following

• /author/
• /comments/
• /tag/

So what are the benefits to using Custom Search engine over your inbuilt system

• Accuracy, it uses Google algorithms and they have on the whole a lot more experience in the field of searching sites then most.
• Its user friendly users are use to this style of results

But this comes with one big disadvantage - crawl time.
Google only comes and crawls a site every few days so its data may be out of date by a few days which means relevant new content may not have been crawled yet.

Google Ajax Search
The Ajax search aspect has been completely rewritten to allow much more freedom to insert information around the reults, this allows some basic manipulation i.e adding sponsered links based on url string, or search term or both so how does this work

1. The Search box makes a call to our Google Custom Search Engine
2. The Ajax Script replaces thed content of a given Div with populated information (eg please wait)
3. Once the results are retrieved the Div is populated with new information
   • header with information and a close button
   • PHP requests generated requests
   • The results
   • Google branding
4. The close button simply replaces the populated div with the old information (AJAX will not allow you to simply go back as you have never left the page)

The whole process can take a little time, but works seemlessly try our example to see.
Once we have tided up the code we will release a simple version of the script with the php additions etc.

How are you using Google Custom Search engine?

Other Articles on the Venture Skills Network about Google Custom Search
Open Search and Google Custom Search Engine - Using the two
Google Custom Search Engine - Our basic ajax search client

Like what you see try these articles on the Venture Skills Network
What’s the future for Google Hosted Applications - Is the future Bright?
Firefox 2.0 experience and Extension round up - Why I’m an extension junkie
Skype vs the World - Is Skype scalable?

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