Big search engines such as Yahoo! and Live Search had several announcements in the past few months about how people can build their own custom search engines. Google has finally joined the party yesterday with their own offering Google Co-op - a customised search engine service which allows users to create a search engine containing only specific websites. 

With this custom search engine you can narrow the number of specific sources that appear on a Google results page. For example, if you’re a Football fan hoping to create the Next Great Football Search Engine, you could tell Google to include only the sites you want, perhaps such as the National Football League, your own football site, a few hand-picked football and soccer sites and blogs, and so on.  This way, when someone searches for [penalty] on your custom football engine, you won’t get any legal sites popping up in the results. You can thus custom build a search engine for your website quickly and easily, focusing on all the things that are important to your company.

As you would expect from a Google product, Google Co-op is very easy to use, and takes only few minutes to set up. It is free and no programming knowledge is needed.  Plenty of options are available for customisation too which makes it easy to make the engine highly targeted and  relevant to your website.  You can

  • search only the sites you select, and include only the pages you want.
  • decide how the content should be prioritised
  • how the search results should look like
  • incrementally add sites to your search engine’s index as you surf the web.
  • invite friends and trusted users to co-edit and contribute to your search engine.
  • have the results opened in an i-frame, and make the results look like an integrated part of your site.

Matt Cutts has reviewed Google Co-op and he’s pretty impressed with it. It certainly has great potential for many client sites and blogs and could help towards sites achieving authority status for their chosen topics.  With this custom search engine, everyone – businesses, organizations, moms, dads, teenagers, and teachers – can now harness the power of Google technology to create a personalized search experience that reflects specific knowledge and interests.

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