Like Yahoo, Google Adds Customized Search Engine

[Erasmus]

Like Yahoo, Google Adds Customized Search Engine
By KATIE HAFNER
Published: October 24, 2006

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 23 — Google introduced a tool Monday that allows Web sites and blogs to offer visitors a customized version of its search engine, narrowing down its vast index so the results are more relevant for users.

Called the Google Custom Search Engine, the new product lets Web site owners choose which pages they want to include in their index and rank the pages as they like.

Yahoo has introduced a similar product, called Search Builder, but Google says its service allows more customization.

“We have some features we feel are quite unique,” said Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president for search products and user experience. “We allow people to restrict or prioritize search results based on the sites they’ve chosen.”

The new service is free. Web site publishers split the revenue from the text advertisements that Google places on the search results through its AdSense program. Nonprofit organizations, government agencies and educational institutions are not required to include ads.

“The trouble with Google is you do get a lot of noise,” said Andrew Frank, a research director in New York with Gartner, a market research firm. “Stuff gets through that isn’t really relevant, either intentionally, or there are sometimes ambiguities. This definitely helps improve the relevance and skip the noise.”

Mr. Frank said the new service had benefits for Google and its advertisers. “For people in the AdSense network, it’s a way to increase inventory,” he said, “and for Google it’s an extension of reach.”

Custom search engines are already up and running on a dozen or so sites. Macworld.com has been using a preliminary version of the product for the last month, customized to cover several Mac-oriented sites owned by Mac Publishing, a unit of IDG.

Jason Snell, vice president and editorial director at Macworld, said his site had been paying to use a search program by another company. But users had been unhappy with the results, and “in the last month, we made the decision to drop it like a rock,” Mr. Snell said. “We pulled it out and put Google in its place. There’s no barrier to switching to Google because Google already knows about all our pages.”

Mr. Snell said the customization tool was easy to configure. “I think you’ll see a lot of people switch their search engine from whatever it might be to this,” he said. “I think people have a comfort zone with Google searches.”

To build a customized index, users fill out a few Web-based forms, and are then given the code for a search box that they can cut and paste into their own Web pages.

“I think what’s going to drive usage is that it’s really easy for users to come up with a search engine in a matter of minutes,” Ms. Mayer said.

Shares of Google hit a record intraday high of $484.64 on Monday, after a strong earnings report last week. The stock closed at $480.71, up $21.11, or 4.6 percent.

Google said Thursday that its third-quarter profit nearly doubled from a year earlier.

The growth came as Google’s largest rival, Yahoo, has suffered from weak sales of search and display advertising. The profit report prompted several Wall Street analysts to raise their ratings on Google stock.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/24/te...html?th&emc=th