CSBE Puts Google's Search Technology On Your Website, with No Ads

By Jason Sherrill
Posted on Jul 18, 2007

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Many site owners use Google's Co-Op Custom Search widget to allow visitors to search for content on their website. It works well and it's free, but seeing your competitors' Google Ads in the search results on YOUR website is irritating. Now, for $100 per year, you can eliminate those ads and also customize your search results using Google's Custom Search Business Edition that Google launched yesterday.

You can sign up for the service at http://www.google.com/cse and the process takes less than five minutes. When complete, Google will give provide you with code and instructions to setup the search on your site. Drop in the code and your visitors can start finding information buried deep inside your site.

Google also provides an XML API that you can use to customize (albeit limited in scope) your way visitors see your search results. If you want to limit Google's search indexing to certain parts of your website, Google alllows you specify exact pages, pages that match a certain naming pattern or even certain domains (if your site's content spans multiple domains).

For $100 per year, it's a good deal, but if you don't mind Google displaying ads on your search results page, you can continue to use the CoOp version for free.