Prompt's TechBlog

As you might have read, Google this week launched its Custom Search Engine (CSE) programme. With CSE, you're the editor, deciding which sites are in and out.

You can give Google a long list of websites to search and have those results used exclusively or prioritised over the rest of Google's index. You can also give it a list of websites you'd like to exclude from the results, such as your competitors or any sites whose views you strongly disagree with.

Google's not giving too much control away though: you can't tell it where you want sites to rank, so whether it's using its full index and prioritising your picks or only searching within your chosen few, it will rank results according to how relevant it thinks they are. Sometimes we've seen it trumping all our chosen sites to list another site from its organic results at the top of the index. Other times we see the results more mixed up.

Your customised search engine is hosted by Google and can also be seamlessly integrated in your own website. It's easy to set up - it took us much longer to patch it into the navbar than it did to do all the clever stuff making the search engine work. Our own search engine prioritises the news sources we watch in preparation for the Prompt Newsletter. We haven't excluded any sites - for search engines to be useful, they have to deliver results. We've just made it easier to find quality sources of information for technology, media and marketing news.

This launch is a great move on Google's part. Sites like Rollyo have been enabling people to roll their own search engines for some time, by creating a list of guru sites on a particular topic and enabling them to be searched from one place. The limitation is that you need a different search engine for each area of expertise. Google's strength is that it can supplement the hand-picked sites with the rest of its index. We hope you'll find our search engine more useful than the default Google in researching technology or media, but you can still use it to research motoring, flower arranging or anything else. It'll work just fine.

Google's also acquiring a lot of expertise on what are considered guru sites. As search engine marketers/spammers (delete according to your attitude) have become adept at using links to increase their apparent popularity, Google is probably looking at other ways to find out what constitutes a quality site. I'm sure Google's worked out that a website that features in many Custom Search Engines is worth bumping up its own rankings.

This is a great tool for all kinds of businesses. It provides useful, sticky content and like all Google web services, it's free. Play with our search engine, let us know if we've missed any important sources, and then go and create your own.