Posts from Tuesday, October 24th, 2006

This morning I got word in my RSS feeds that Google has launched what they call “customized search engines” through Google Co-Op.  As a test, I created a CSS search engine.  Go ahead, try it out.

       

There are two ways to configure a custom search engine.  One is to search the whole web but emphasize the sites you list.  The other is to search only the sites you list.  While the second might seem to be overly restrictive, the first doesn’t really seem very useful, at least for a CSS search engine.  When I compared the “CSS search” to “Web search” results, they really didn’t differ all that much—in some cases, having the same ten results on the first page, but in a slightly different order.  On occasion, the “Web search” ordering was actually more useful.

So I set up the CSS search to be restricted to the sites I listed, which I thought seemed relatively useful.  Only whenever I run the search from meyerweb instead of within Google, I get the “whole Web” search instead of the “only my sites search”, which either means I’m doing something wrong or I’m just too early an adopter.  Hopefully it’ll work as intended for you.  (Update: it seems to be working as intended now.)

Anyway, I’m not about to pretend that the six sites I included constitute the entirety of sites with useful CSS information.  Thus, I’ve set up the CSS search to be open to any volunteers.  If you have a Google Co-Op account (which I think is just any old Google developer account, such as you might have created for Google Maps) or want to create one, you can add sites to the ‘approved’ list without any say-so on my part.  Though I do have the power to boot sites that aren’t relevant, or too far out of date, or that look at me cross-eyed, or whatever.  To do so, I think you click the “Edit this seach engine” link on my CSS Search home page and then click on “Collaboration” to volunteer.  Or you might be able to go directly there.  I have to accept volunteers, so kindly be patient if it takes me a day or three.  And I’m going to simply reject any anonymous volunteers—sorry if that’s you.

For those that don’t have or want a Google account, feel free to suggest sites in the comments here.  In terms of getting them actually added, you’ll be at the mercy of my free time; but then again, so am I.

• CSS Search was published on Tuesday, October 24th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the CSS category.
• There have been twenty-six replies.