Filed under: Internet, Web services, Google
Google launches Custom Search Engines
Google launched a customizable search engine today. This is a program where both individuals and organizations can build a search that will produce results that accommodate their audience requests better, in no time at all. Not only will the searches be tailored to website visitors with prioritized results and the ability to allow other user contribute to the search index, but the results can be monetized with Google AdSense. Thus displaying advertisements where site owners can make money. The customizable search engine will also be modifiable so that it is branded for users specific applications. Google built the Custom Search Engine to make it easy for anyone to create a search engine about their favorite topics. In order to begin creating a search engine, users go to http://www.google.com/coop/cse/ and select the websites or pages they would like to include into their index under their Google Account username. Users can then have the opportunity to restrict or increasing ranking for results. And in order to better fit the engine into their website, users can customize the look and feel.
Some examples of the Custom Search Engine can be seen at JumpUp.com, and RealClimate.org.
I don't know if this is a labor of love or merely the brainchild of four very gifted games designers, but Level Up is a really weird mash-up of gaming elements that you have probably never seen in a Flash game before.
Let's start with the premise itself: Groundhog Day meets Memento. The game experience revolves around 'days': you explore the world and the clock slowly ticks towards the evening. You bounce around picking up gems and talking to the denizens of 'Level Upland'. Eventually you feel tired and head back to ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
ipodrulz said 12:32AM on 10-24-2006
What ever happened to: 'not introducing new products, and improving on current ones'...... O things can change so fast.
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Mysterius said 1:14AM on 10-24-2006
Well, this could be viewed mainly as an improvement on search, which is (supposed to be) their main/core service/product.
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ThwartedEfforts said 5:30AM on 10-24-2006
This was significantly uninteresting.
Sure, it sounds all new and exciting (who wouldn't want their own personalised search engine?) but I don't see more than a handful of people actually using it. Only a fractional percentage of users know about Froogle or Google Maps, both of which have far more real world value:
1. Google Web Search: 79.9 percent
2. Google Image Search: 9.2 percent
3. Google Mail/Gmail: 5.6 percent
4. Google News: 1.6 percent
5. Google Maps: 0.8 percent
6. Froogle: 0.7 percent
7. Google Scholar: 0.6 percent
8. Google Groups/Groups 2 Beta: 0.5 percent
9. Google Print: 0.4 percent
10. Google Earth: 0.3 percent
11. Google Directory: 0.2 percent
12. Google Local: 0.1 percent
13. Google Answers: 0.1 percent
14. Google AdWords: 0.06 percent
15. Google Desktop Search: 0.04 percent
16. Google Talk: 0.02 percent
(Data from 8th November 2005)
You know, the more and more "products" they release, the more it becomes obvious that most people use Google because their search engine just works. And there is no other reason. Stupid niche ideas are still stupid niche ideas.
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Putch said 11:04AM on 10-24-2006
Upon checking this out, three features stood out:
1) You can exclude sites that you do not want in the results
2) You can easily do so using the Google Marker
3) Anyone can volunteer to help
So we decided to throw up an experiment to encourage everyone to mark spam sites to be excluded from search results.
Working together as a community we may be able to radically improve the quality of the search results (or perhaps just get in a blacklisting war?)
The result is Putch - http://www.putch.com
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Salem said 11:33AM on 10-24-2006
Thwartedefforts,
You do not seem to understand what the word niche means. It is by definition small, or at least smaller. Google understands that it costs them essentially nothing to offer new and improved products. They could carry 100,000,000 different things and the websearch engine would probably remain the most widely used thing. Wat is amazing is that all every product would likely be used by someone. Even if its one person.
Over 20% of Google's visitors are to these other "stupid niche ideas". That is significant.
Google's not in the business of big blockbuster hits. Yes they have a great search engine that a lot of people use, but what about those that want something better than that? Ignore them? It appears 20% have found what they were looking for already. Google is just trying to help the rest of the world find what it is looking for.
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ThwartedEfforts said 1:21PM on 10-24-2006
You clearly haven't read the news this past week or so:
====Analysts said Google was fighting a problem that had historically plagued technology giants, many of which became so enamored with innovating that they forgot to create products that people would really use.
'They created a bunch of crap that they have no idea what to do with,' Rob Enderle, principal analyst with Enderle Group, a Silicon Valley consulting firm, said of Google. 'What a huge waste of resources.'
Google admitted this year that its internal audits discovered that the company had been spending too much time on new services to the detriment of its core search engine.
"I was getting lost in the sheer volume of the products that we were releasing," said Sergey Brin, Google's president of technology.====
My post reinforced the company's own statement that visitors were being confused by Google products, and that it would have to stop releasing new ones and instead concentrate on improving the things people actually use.
Of course, with a user base the size of Google's, you could argue that even a fractional percentage is huge. But that's missing the point that, in pandering to a minority of Internet users, many of whom are attracted simply by something being 'new' and 'different' rather than genuinely useful, Google is at risk of losing its core business to competitors.
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