The Fatty Talks by Adam Hirsch

From the e-mail:

What’s new with Google Custom Search?

We’ve been busy developing some great new features that make Custom Search an even better fit for your website or blog, and we realized you might not have heard about some of the things that we’ve been up to lately.  Read on to learn about the new Custom Search Business Edition and how you can use it for site search, and how you can create a Custom Search Engine on the fly, such as one for your entire blogroll. You’ll also hear Salesforce.com recently began using Custom Search.

Put a Custom Search Engine on your company website
Turn off ads, and access search results through XML API with Business Edition

Many businesses have approached us about using the Custom Search Engine to power site search on their websites.  Businesses expressed great excitement about what Custom Search can do, but they often had two requirements for search on their site:

1. no ads, so that visitors stay on their site instead of leaving for a different one
2. complete customization of the look and feel of search results

So that’s why we developed Custom Search Business Edition.

The Business Edition turns off ads and allows you to access search results through an XML API.  This means that you can create your own user interface for search results and have your search engine fit in seamlessly with the rest of your website. Custom Search Business Edition starts at $100 per year for searching less than 5,000 web pages.

You can create a new Business Edition search engine by visiting http://www.google.com/coop/cse/business/create
Alternatively, convert your existing Custom Search Engine to the Business Edition through the control panel at http://www.google.com/coop/manage/cse/

Until recently, the primary way to change your Custom Search Engine’s configuration was to log into your control panel, and either modify settings, or upload an XML configuration file.  For the common use case of picking a few sites to search, this approach is just fine.
But what if you want to search different sites, and sometimes that collection of sites isn’t fixed?  For example, suppose you want to search your blog, and every site your blog links to (commonly called a blogroll).  You don’t want to have to update your Custom Search Engine each time you update your blog.
To support this sort of search, we developed the ability to create a Custom Search Engine on the fly.  You can now configure your Custom Search Engine so that it searches a collection of sites that isn’t static, but rather dynamically chosen on the fly.  How it works is somewhat technical, but basically you instruct your search engine to use a configuration file that dynamically lists the sites you want to search.
You can read all about how to create a Custom Search Engine on the fly at http://googlecustomsearch.blogspot.com/2007/06/custom-search-engine-apis.html
And if you’re interested in adding search to your Blogger blog, check out http://bloggerindraft.blogspot.com/2007/07/new-feature-search-box.html

Salesforce.com recently implemented Custom Search Business Edition on developer.salesforce.com, their website for developers using the Apex development platform. Salesforce.com provides a community and knowledge base that consists of discussion boards, blogs, and wikis, and they needed a search engine that could search across all of that content. We recently met with Adam Gross, their VP of Developer Relations, to hear how developers use their site’s search engine as a tool when they’re researching how to build products on the Salesforce platform. To hear the story in his own words, check out this video.

Watch video