Although the concept of customized search engines is not unique or mushroomed overnight, it has taken on new significance after Google’s free sitesearch , Yahoo! Search Builder and Swiki community powered search engine have debuted. We have implemented our own Swiki woman centric search engine earlier.
All such custom engines basically offered search results based on user-set criteria. You initiate a search engine through one of the publicly offered services based on your preferred set of URLs. You can tweak the search results pages and enhance the listings as you go along in the case of Swiki. As the name implies, it takes a life of its own when more collaborators or partners in your community join in and refine the search results.
Google has unveiled its own Google Custom Search Engine ( you will find more details and comments by Google’s Matt Cutts here:
What does it offer ?
Does it offer something unique which is not offered elsewhere ?
We wanted to find out for ourselves and what better way than trying it out. It took us barely a few minutes to head to the Google coop and define our own search engine. We rolled out a spanking new custom search engine – Woman centric search engine – powered by Google. You can try this Woman-Centric Search Engine here: Custom Woman Centric Search Engine
As far as we could see in the initial test run, the results are mainly sourced from the regular Google index with perhaps a couple of results thrown in from the preferred list. We deliberately kept our preferred list to 2. You guessed it right – we used our own URL as the first in the list. You can access the preferred list from the control panel -> sites.
We have seeded the search results with keyword phrases which would refine the results to women centered sites, though the results are not in consonance with the avowed motto – provide consistent search results primarily targeted at women. It is only the beginning and so would wait for more collaborators to join in and add to the refinement.
We have been getting quite some positive feedback and referrals from Swiki. Swiki offers easy to customize search results. We are still in the process of evaluating the new Google custom engine. We will share our results in this blog.