As many others are doing, Google is reminiscing about the year that is almost over, and reflecting upon some of its accomplishments. The Custom Search Team specifically is reflecting on some of its highlights for 3009.

Google lists the following as key developments for the year in custom search:

• integration with several hosters to bring Custom Search to your doorstep
• enabled support for rich snippets, giving you more control over presentation of results
• it’s now easier for you to promote specific content to the top of your search results
• we deployed contextual search within Blogger, Google Sites and Wikipedia
• automatic transliteration is now integrated into the search box
• improved results rendering flexibility with the Custom Search Element
• plug-n-play with themes for enhanced customizability of results look and feel
• added support for structured metadata and the ability to restrict results by specific attributes
• we got you ready for the growing population of users searching your websites with mobile devices, such as Android phones, iPhone, iPod Touch, Palm Pre, etc.

Google promises additional metadata support in the new year, with more results customization and other features for Custom Search. With that in mind, it may be a good time to give Google you feedback, if you are a user of Custom Search. They’re openly requesting it.
 

Related Articles:

> Google Does Some New Things with Custom Search

> Google Launches Custom Search For Smartphones

> AdSense For Search, Custom Search Come Together

When a Wikipedia user enables the Custom Search skin, he/she will be able to use Google Custom Search across all Wikipedia articles for a given topic and find relevant pages linked from the Wikipedia page that he/she is currently on. Search results will appear inline at the top of the Wikipedia page.

Results are organized into 3 tabbed groups: All Wikipedia pages, Linked Wikipedia pages, and Linked non-Wikipedia pages.

"Linked Custom Search enables the creation of dynamic search experiences, where the content being searched can be defined on the fly, and can change over time as new information becomes relevant," explains Google. "The Custom Search skin creates a Linked Custom Search engine on demand for every Wikipedia page that you navigate to."

More on that here.

Google has also now introduced "structured" custom search. If you use a Custom Search Element, you can now add publisher-provided links to your search results based on specific metadata markup in your web pages.

"These special structured data objects, such as Thumbnails and Actions, are generated from the PageMaps you provide," Google says. "For example, Scribd, one of our partners, provides both Thumbnails and Actions in PageMaps on their pages, so we display both of these in our sample Custom Search engine, as shown below. The Actions in this case are ‘Download’ and ‘Fullscreen View’, but each publisher can provide customized actions, which they can also style via CSS."

More on that here.

Finally, Google has launched Custom Search Themes. Users can choose from a number of different styles. They can also customize them further by changing fonts, colors, backgrounds, etc.

"You can also select from among a set of convenient layouts for full flexibility on the location of the search box and results – contiguous or in 2 columns – you decide!" says Google. "We’ve even added a compact layout (with only 4 results) that is useful for websites where space is at a premium and search results will not occupy the whole page."

Learn more about Google’s Custom Search Themes here.

Related Articles:

> Google Launches Custom Search For Smartphones

> Facebook/Twitter On-Demand XML Sitemaps for Custom Search

> AdSense For Search, Custom Search Come Together

The following devices are supported:

- Android-powered phones
- iPhone
- iPod Touch
- Palm Pre

When users search on a site with Google’s Custom Search box, they are redirected to a Google-hosted Custom Search results page created specifically for the siteowner’s custom engine. If webmasters would rather serve the results from their own site, however, Google does give that option. They can host their own version of the mobile Custom Search home page.

"You can test this out on your phone right now. Here are a few samples: search for user-generated content (e.g., search for "zakumi") from sites like Wikipedia or Knol, or look for more information on Custom Search (e.g., search for "promotion")," says Google Search Group Product Manager Rajat Mukherjee. "As you can see, Custom Mobile Search results can match the look and feel of your own website, and we’ve enabled interactive features, such as label tabs for navigation, as well as promotions."

More information about setting up custom search for mobile can be found here in this post from the Custom Search blog.

The addition of custom search for smartphones should make a lot of people happy. The company says one of its most requested features in a Product Ideas survey was about enabling a mobile version of custom search. Google says that more features will be coming soon.

They have come with the launch of their On-Demand Indexing that could actually assist the webmasters in enhancing their experience with Google Webmaster services in a better way! With help of this tool, the users can inform Google about the newly updated pages of their websites, or the ones that are new!

How it will assist the webmasters?

As a result, Custom Search will immediately schedule these pages for crawl, index and even serve the pages in their CSEs with a short span of one day!

“How do you tell us about these URLs? You guessed it… provide a Sitemap to Webmaster Tools, like you always do, and tell Custom Search about it. Just go to the CSE control panel, click on the Indexing tab, select your On-Demand Sitemap, and hit the "Index Now" button. You can tell us which of these URLs are most important to you via the priority and lastmod attributes that you provide in your Sitemap. Each CSE has a number of pages allocated within the On-Demand Index, and with these attributes, you can us which are most important for indexing. If you need greater allocation in the On-Demand index, as well as more customization controls, Google Site Search provides a range of options.”

“Some important points to remember:

1. You only need to submit your Sitemaps once in Webmaster Tools. Custom Search will automatically list the Sitemaps submitted via Webmaster Tools and you can decide which Sitemap to select for On-Demand Indexing.
2. Your Sitemap needs to be for a website verified in Webmaster Tools , so that we can verify ownership of the right URLs.
3. In order for us to index these additional pages, our crawlers must be able to crawl them. You can use "Webmaster Tools > Crawl Errors > URLs restricted by robots.txt" or check yourrobots.txt file to ensure that you’re not blocking us from crawling these pages.
4. Submitting pages for On-Demand Indexing will not make them appear any faster in the main Google index, or impact ranking on Google.com.”-GOOGLE

Comments

The list of benefits is, if not endless, at least kind of long.  On Google’s Inside AdSense blog, Sandra Tsui writes, "Now you can choose to provide just site search so users can find all the information they’re looking for on your site, and you can host the search results on your own pages so that they can find that information without leaving your site."

 AdSense For Search Joins With Custom Search

Also, "Search terms can have different meanings in different contexts, so you can now configure your search engine with relevant keywords.  Let’s say you manage a site about yoga – you can enter keywords such as ‘yoga,’ ‘exercise,’ and ‘meditation’ so that when a user searches for ‘mat,’ the search results and ads will be more related to yoga mats and less to commercial floor mats."

Vertical search and ad location options are part of the package, as well.  Everything’s free, of course, and making it through the initial setup (visit the "AdSense Setup" tab) and future updates should be a painless process.

Tsui didn’t mention anything involving percentages or dollar signs, but then, that’s not really the Google way.  Site owners are encouraged to just try things out and see what kind of improvements they can create for themselves.