Programmable Search Engine Blog
The latest news, updates and tips from the Programmable Search Engine team
Control over your Autocompletions
Thursday, October 7, 2010
Query autocompletion
has been the most popular feature in the history of Custom Search. Users love it, and websites use it to help people find alternate queries that get them to the right information faster.
Since launch, one of the most commonly requested features has been administrative control over the autocompletions that surface when people start typing their queries. We’re happy to announce that you can now control inclusions and exclusions to autocompletions.
For example, on our sample restaurant review search engine, typing “
che
” triggers an autocompletion for “
cheese
” and not “
cheese jalapeno poppers
", one of our tasty snacks. Typing “
chicken
” did uncover “
chicken livers
” (ugh!) but did not propose “
chicken tandoori
”, an interesting menu item that we’d like to promote to our users.
With the new inclusion and exclusion options in the control panel, managing autocompletions is a breeze: we just added “
cheese
” and “
chicken livers
” to the list of
exclusions
, and inserted “
chicken tandoori
” and “
cheese jalapeno poppers
” into the
included
autocompletion list.
A few hours of processing, and the new autocomplete modifications kick in.
We hope you enjoy the new controls that further enhance autocompletions on your search engine. You can even upload included and excluded autocompletions
in bulk
in the control panel. Let us know if you have any
feedback
, and enjoy your spicy cheese poppers!
Posted by: Andy Herrman, Software Engineer and Salmaan Rashid, Senior Technical Solutions Engineer
Themed ads in Custom Search
Friday, September 10, 2010
Last year, we took a big step forward towards improved customization of the look and feel of results by providing
plug-n-play themes
in the Custom Search
Element
. This allowed people to select from among a palette of predefined styles. You can find a style that matches your website and deploy search, or
further
customize the style if required.
Today, we’re taking themes one step further. Each theme now has ads rendered with a different look and feel to match the overall style used for the search results.
The outcome is harmony between search results and ads, which we think makes for a great user experience. The following screenshots are examples of search results and ads rendered with three different themes -
espresso
,
minimalist
and
green sky
.
We hope you agree that your visitors will enjoy themed ads. As always, be sure to send us your
feedback
.
Posted by: Ben Lisbakken, Software Engineer and John Skidgel, Senior Interaction Designer
JibJab + Google Site Search = more laughs
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Today’s guest post comes from Chris Poe, Engineering Director at JibJab Media
The folks at
JibJab
are good at doing two things: Making people laugh and... Okay, so maybe weʼre REALLY good at one thing: Making people laugh. Finding the perfect birthday eCard for your friends and family has always been a priority for us here at JibJab. We all felt that search would be the perfect compliment to our existing browsing experience and then we discovered
Google Site Search
... our wildest dreams were about to become reality.
Seriously. We get search functionality without having to build search functionality.
The beauty of Google Site Search is that it can all be done with a small addition to your web page markup and no change to the back end of your web application.
