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The Google Custom Search Engine
Ever wish you could create a personalized, customized search engine that searches only across sites that you specify and displays results that you know will be right for you or your students? Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) allows you do do just that. All you need to do is choose the websites and pages you'd like to search, then follow a few simple steps to create a CSE. Think of it as putting the power of Google web search to work for you.
Let's say you're a grade school teacher and you want your students to access only child-safe sites. You can pre-select the sites, list them in the settings of your new search engine, and then let your students use it -- knowing that they're searching the web safely. And because you choose the sites to search, they'll get a limited number of highly relevant search results, making the time they spend online more efficient and rewarding.
You can also share your knowledge and expertise with colleagues and the educational community at large by creating a CSE that searches a specific set of educational sites, professionally vetted resources, or an esoteric blend of your personal favorites. There's no limit to the number of CSEs you can create -- in fact, since we released the CSE tool, people have created more than 100,000 custom search engines, reflecting all kinds of interests and purposes.
With Google Custom Search Engine, you can:
- Create a CSE at any time and Google will give you a landing page with a unique URL. You also have the option of applying your own site's look and feel.
- Invite friends and colleagues to collaborate and contribute to your search engine, enhancing its usefulness to your community.
- Provide your own search refinements within results pages so it's easier for your users to find the information they're looking for.
- Easily add more sites to your search engine's index as you surf the web.
- New! You can create a CSE on the fly simply by cutting and pasting a few lines of code into your website's HTML. Your new automatically generated CSE will let people search the websites you've linked to, as well as the sites they link to. For instance, if you've created a directory, a blog roll, or a list of online resources, your CSE will enable your users to search across these sites and the sites they reference.
What will your CSE look like? If you choose to have Google host it, it will
look something like Lucy Gray's Research Sites for
Kids.
If you already have your own website, you can integrate your new CSE in your site. On this Google Pages site, for instance, the CSE appears as a search box and results are displayed on the site.
Realclimate.org is another example of an integrated Custom Search Engine -- note the search box in the top right, and the search results which appear below.
What would you like your colleagues or students to discover on the web? Give it some thought, then feel free to give Google Custom Search Engine a try.
Teachers speak out
 "Google Custom Search Engine is incredibly useful for teachers. Essentially, you create your own search engine by selecting the sites that Google will index. It searches only the sites I specify, bypassing a lot of the junk. Why is this useful? I've accumulated 400+ bookmarks related to the material I teach, and I add more all the time -- it can take a long time to find what I'm looking for. Now I use my Google Custom Search Engine to search through all the sites instead of sorting them. Sites such as PBS.org, free.ed.gov, and the History News Network have an enormous amount of great material... Now I can quickly search all of them for relevant content in a fraction of the time. The same thing applies to all those sites that specialize in lesson plans. It takes forever to find anything worthwhile. It's much faster just to search though them, and search all of them at once. I've created a custom Google search engine... My hope is that this can become a teaching tool used and maintained by a community of teachers."
Nate Grondin, Social Studies Teacher |
