I believe a Custom Search Engine (CSE) is an undervalued resource in a search. I couldn’t find much information on how to use it, and the functionality looked very confusing. It was frustrating to me as an avid Googler (and I have everything Google: from Google docs to pixel phone).
The time has come to familiarize myself with the tool and it turned out to be not as scary as it seemed.
In this article, let’s go through the basics:
The intention of this post is to give you the gist of CSE and if it sounds like an avenue to explore, have a look at Discover more: A Complete Guide to Google Programmable Search Engines by Irina Shamaeva and David Galley.
What is a Google Custom Search Engine?
Google CSE is a platform that allows users to customize their searches. It still uses Google-indexed websites, but it also gives an opportunity to refine and categorize your queries. Remember the times when you when to a music shop to buy a CD of your fav band? Now you most probably arrange your playlists with Spotify or any similar platform to shuffle, place, and customize the lists based on your preferences. You still get your fav music, but the way you interact with it and experience it is completely different and more personalized to what you actually want. So CSE is like “Spotify for your search”.
CSE comes with many benefits:
👌Pros:
- No need to be an expert with advanced search syntax
- No CAPTCHA torture. You come across CAPTCHA only when you create your CSE: the search results are CAPTCHA free!
- You can better limit your search to a specific geography. It really makes a difference when you run searches on Twitter, for instance.
- You can download your search query, edit the text file and upload it back to CSE! The format will be XML, but you don’t need to be very techy to edit the file.
- Run one search on different websites customizing the query for each website
- Tell Google how to prioritize the results it returns back
Being a Google fan, my opinion may be biased, thus, I found only one shortcoming (Feel free to add yours in the comments)
🥺 Cons:
Search results are limited to 100 in one search
Here is a snippet of how to set up a CSE which I created with Scribe, a fantastic extension to check out ✔️.
If it doesn’t feel scary anymore, stay tuned for CSE 2.0 to learn about refinements, metadata types and more!
