I didn’t realise the power of Google Coop’s custom search engines (CSE) until I watched Scoble interviewing Google’s Shashi Seth. In a nutshell, CSE lets you create a search engine that’s focuses on specific sites, like UK blogs or Photoshop sites
Anyone can create these. You can edit other people’s search engines too. There are a huge number of custom search engines you can volunteer to edit.
I’ve created a bunch of search engines myself:
- Search my site
- Search Calvin and Hobbes quotes
- Search for Indian torrents
- Search for Tamil mp3 files
- Search for Tamil lyrics
You’ll find that the Tamil mp3s and lyrics searches are very poor. This is because Google CSE does not show results in Google’s “supplemental index” — which has most of the useful results for MP3 searches. Fortunately Google plans to add supplemental results.
You can improve these searches. Just click on the search link and click on “Volunteer to contribute to this search engine” at the bottom.
PS: I’m working on a books search engine as well, but until the supplemental index is added, there’s not much I can do with it.
This is damn neat.. i am trying to build a financial search engine for india – http://google.com/coop/cse?cx=012852517959602439280%3Ajy0du1sputi first cut but i like the refinement part, need to work on it to make it better.