Programmable Search Engine Blog

Custom Search Engine is now Programmable Search Engine

Thursday, April 30, 2020

Over the past year, we have made a series of improvements to Custom Search Engine to make it ever more powerful and more flexible. Our launch of Callbacks made it possible to customize the rendering of search results beyond what is possible through our standard controls in the Custom Search Engine control panel. The Knowledge Graph launch made it easy to tap into the power of Google’s understanding of the semantic web to build search experiences based on topics and concepts.

Looking forward, our exciting roadmap will continue to focus on making public web content programmatically accessible and your search engines more flexible. As our product has evolved, we believe our branding should as well. We are excited to announce that Custom Search Engine will now be called Programmable Search Engine.

Over the next several months, you’ll start to see this branding change reflected throughout the entire user experience.

We invite you to learn more about Programmable Search Engine and to get started.

Bringing the Power of Knowledge Graph to Custom Search

Wednesday, July 10, 2019

We're happy to announce that Custom Search Engine (CSE) owners can now use Knowledge Graph entities to configure their CSE. The Knowledge Graph (KG) is used by Google Search to help users discover information more quickly and easily, and contains millions of entries that describe real-world entities like people, places, and things.

CSE owners can use KG Entities to

Define which pages the CSE searches
Create Refinements to narrow down search results within a CSE.

For more information about using Knowledge Graph Entities to define and refine your Custom Search Engine, visit our developer documentation.

Here are some examples of what you can do:

Searching the entire web for specific Entities

CSE's KG Entity support makes it easy to search the entire web for pages (or images) about specific topics.
We've configured this CSE to search the entire web for pages about Alphabet companies, using the CSE control panel as shown below:

Try out the CSE here: https://cse.google.com/cse?cx=000888210889775888983:b2bhygxt4le

Searching specific pages for Entities

Instead of searching the entire web, you can combine KG entities with CSE's existing site search functionality.
For example, we've configured this CSE to search Wikipedia for pages about the entity Pittsburgh:

Try out the CSE here: https://cse.google.com/cse?cx=000888210889775888983:x1jaj-jlc3e

Defining Refinements with Entities

CSE's refinements feature allows users to drill down into their search results. Now, CSE owners can use KG entities to define the refinements if their CSE.

For example, we defined this CSE to be about the Knowledge Graph Entity "basketball":

Then we add refinements for basketball subtopics, like the NBA, WNBA, College, Olympic basketball, and basketball gear. For example, this refinement returns pages that are about both Basketball (from the top-level CSE definition) and Sports Equipment, Shoes, or Jerseys:

Try out the CSE here: https://cse.google.com/cse?cx=000888210889775888983:-nzsrilglze

Introducing Callbacks for even more rendering control

Monday, June 24, 2019

For our power users that are interested in customizing the rendering of search results beyond what is possible through our standard controls in the Custom Search Engine control panel, we are introducing a new set of Callback functions that will unlock new capabilities to customize your search result rendering even further.

Callbacks provide an opportunity to customize the experience during the rendering flow of the search results in powerful new ways. We are introducing callbacks for when the search begins, when the results are ready, and when the results are rendered. If you would like to augment your results with additional information or increased interactivity, callbacks provide an easy way to build on top of the already existing customizations you have for Custom Search Engine.

Please note that this feature only applies to the Custom Search Element API of the Custom Search Engine. These Callbacks are not applicable to the JSON API of the Custom Search Engine. Also, these callbacks only modify the organic search results; they do not modify any of the advertising or the rendering of the advertising returned from the Custom Search Element API.

Learn how to use these new functions in the Search Callbacks section of the Custom Search Element API for more details.

We are excited to see what new customizations our vibrant and creative publisher ecosystem will bring to Customized Search Engines with these new callbacks.

We would like to hear your feedback and comments on this new functionality. We invite you to share your thoughts in our user forum.

The Google Custom Search Engine Team

Improving our mobile layout

Monday, April 22, 2019

We are pleased to announce a new mobile layout that should provide an improved experience for mobile device users. We’ve changed the look of the search box and refinements, increased the size of the thumbnails, and simplified the pagination.

Before After

Most of these changes only affect mobile devices, but the refinements have also been updated for desktop.

Before After

The mobile-specific changes can be optionally disabled by setting the "mobileLayout" attribute of the search element to “disabled”.

Expanding our Custom Search Engine offerings.

Monday, July 16, 2018

We are excited to announce an expansion of our Custom Search Engine offerings. We offer the following implementation options for Custom Search Engine.

Standard Search Element - This free, ads supported search element is easily added to your site with simple javascript, is available for everyone, and has no daily query limit.
Nonprofit Search Element - This free search element is available for non-profit groups (such as charities, schools, and governments), and is similar to the Standard Search Element but does not have advertising.
JSON API - This API costs $5 per thousand queries, allows programmatic access, and does not have advertising or Google branding. However, this API is limited to 10,000 queries per day.

Today, we are excited to add a fourth implementation option.

Site Restricted JSON API - This API is similar to the JSON API above, but there is no daily query cap for Custom Search Engines that search 10 sites or fewer.

Learn more about how to use the Site Restricted JSON API from the developer site, or learn more about the differences between these offerings to help select the implementation option that works best for you.

Improving our offering for Nonprofits and Schools

Wednesday, July 26, 2017

If you are a nonprofit or a school looking for high quality, customizable search experiences for your site, organization, or school, we are excited to announce that Custom Search Engine is now integrating with Google For Nonprofits, https://www.google.com/nonprofits/, and with Google For Education, https://edu.google.com/products/productivity-tools/, to offer Custom Search Engine for free without advertising. Learn how to sign up for these programs in our help center.

Refocusing and looking forward on Custom Search Engine

Thursday, February 16, 2017

We have several important announcements that may affect your Custom Search Engine or may require you to make changes to your Custom Search Engine. Please read this post carefully.

Custom Search Engine (CSE) is a great way to build custom search experiences for your website visitors. The search space is evolving rapidly and we want to make sure that CSE continues to evolve to meet the needs of your users, whether they are visiting from desktop or mobile devices. In order for us to achieve this, we first need to clean up some older access points that cannot support the improvements we will be adding.

Beginning in April 2017, the following API access points, and some associated features, will no longer be available:

Feature

How to tell if you are using it

What to do instead

V1 API and AutoCSE

Look for the javascript google.search.CustomSearchControl

Move to the current API.

Linked CSE

Look for an http request containing a ‘cref’ parameter

Use the CSE control panel to set your CSE configuration.

Annotation Feeds

Webmasters that host annotation files on their website

Use the CSE control panel to input or upload your annotations.

Dynamically extracted links

An included or excluded site uses the “Dynamically extract links from this page” option

Use the CSE control panel to input or upload your annotations

Autocomplete Removals

Search Features → Autocomplete → Custom Autocompletions → excluded or excluded patterns

There will no longer be a way to exclude certain autocompletions.

Autocomplete Promotions

Search Features → Autocomplete → Custom Autocompletions → promotions

There will no longer be a way to show promotions inside autocompletions; however, normal promotions will continue to work.

Ads UI style customization

Look for custom Ad Styles in the AdSense frontend under My Ads → Search Ads → Settings

The Ads UI will now be updated to use the styling of organic search results, which can be updated in the Look and Feel tab of the CSE control panel

We recognize that making these changes may be inconvenient, but cleaning up these old interfaces will allow us to focus on many new and exciting improvements to CSE. We will be modernizing the look and feel of CSE for both desktop and mobile users, improving uptime and latency, and working on the quality of our search results and autocomplete. We look forward to delivering a better CSE experience for webmasters and your website visitors alike.