Bootstrapping your CSEs from keywords

Custom Search provides upto 5000 URL patterns to define a “slice” of the web to search over. However, if you’re creating a Custom Search Engine on a topic, such as “global warming”, finding more than a few good sites for a topic can be hard. We recently launched suggested sites to help suggest more sites for your search engine similar to  your included sites.

Today, we’re introducing another tool that is hopefully intuitive as well as interesting : You can discover hundreds of sites to include in your CSE starting just with keywords! For example, for a CSE on “global warming”, adding keywords like [pollution], [global warming] and [greenhouse effect] can lead you to discover global warming related sites within minutes.

This tool attempts to combine Google’s knowledge with the topic expertise you have - Google suggests sites, but you can control the topic expansion, and guide the tool towards your topic in a fine grained way.



The tool is accessible off of the New Search Engine page on the Custom Search control panel.  Give the tool a whirl, see more details on how the tool works in our documentation, and let us know what you think on the product forum.