A Custom Search Engine for Your Site in Five Minutes


Google Co-Op Search EngineA short while ago I discovered an interesting insurance blog, with just the kind of thought-provoking articles I find helpful. But it had no site search. I wanted to explore all the archives, but right then I did not have time to scroll through each month’s archives for the past year.

A few minutes later, I went to another another blog. It had a solution that the first blog could have benefited by: Google Co-Op Custom search.

I saw Google Co-Op in practice via a post at Tech Without Wires, a blog about the mobile office. Elwyn Jenkins explains how he created a custom Google search engine for that blog using the Google Co-Op Custom Search Engine.

At first I was skeptical. I usually don’t bother with the traditional Google “search this site” boxes. All they ever seem to bring up are the pages that Google has indexed in a site. Usually that means some small number of pages and certainly not the recent ones.

But Google’s Co-Op Custom Search Engine is different. I did some random testing, plugging in phrases specific to recent posts at Tech Without Wires (within the past week). The Google Custom Search Engine brought up every single page.

Google Co-Op Custom Search Engine not only searches your site, but it also will search sites that you link to or are reading.


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Anita Campbell Anita Campbell is the Founder, CEO and Publisher of Small Business Trends and has been following trends in small businesses since 2003. She is the owner of BizSugar, a social media site for small businesses.

3 Reactions
  1. It is amazing what Google has to offer. I didn’t know about this and am on my way to find out. Thanks, Lynn
    Lynn Manniong Ross, founder and author, http://www.smartsite.com, Converting content into ebooks for cell phones and the Publishing Fast Track blog

  2. Wow, what a great feature, I’ll be checking it out now too as I was not aware of it either. And I agree with you – scrolling through the archives is time consuming. Bloggers – this is a great solution!

  3. It’s not the on-site search engine I want. I need a resource that can give me hard to find authoritative information fast. So far I think Google don’t manage this very well. LIVE.com seems to be going in the right direction. But increasingly I am looking to small search or research resources. More recently I discovered knuru.com. This one is connected to Wharton Business School and it gives me a few options I don’t find with other engines. This includes sorting results by date; natural language search; and dynamically created contextualised summaries. This last point is great as I find the summary is sometimes so good that I don’t need to go to the original article. Believe me when i say this saves me a LOT of time on my research projects. knuru offers both strategic and news results under two tabs and is focused on Business content. Search engines for vertical industry sectors seems to be the new way/direction. Anyone know of others like this one for other areas/sectors?