It is very important a website have a search engine. if you have the type of website that has large or even small content, there are chances visitors to your site will want to search for information in your site, how do you expect them to find such information when there is no search engine in your website.
Thanks to Google the search giant, they’ve made creating search engine for website easy without you doing any learning any programing language or write a line of code.
To create a search engine that will search your website for a query word or sentence, the use of Google Custom Search Engines (CSE) is by far the easiest, quickest and efficient way of achieving this. follow the steps below to learn how to Create A Custom Search Engine For Your Website
- Head over to Google CSE
- Click the create custom search engine button
- Fill the form specifying your website address(s) or URL(s), name and choosing your language then hitting the Create button
- Congratulation, your custom search engine is created
- Click the Get code to get the code to copy to your site that will add the custom search powered by Google.
- To view the DEMO pf it, click the Public URL
NOTE for a better and enhance experience of the Google custom, you are optionally told to upgrade to the paid Google Site Search. this is not to say the free one isn’t good, the basic thing you want in a search widget are all present in it. one striking difference between them is, the free service contain Ads while the enterprise or premium plan is ads free.
Customizing The Search Widget
On the left sidebar, select your created search engine under the Edit search engine
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Styling The Look And Feel
Click on the Look and feel link to reveal a tool to help customize and extend the search widget.
- To add a promotion ADS when a given word(s) is search , click the Search features link and enable promotion
You can also do some tweaking of the search feature to your choice like auto-complete, refinements, synonyms, and some advance settings such as Result sorting, Websearch settings, Websearch restricts, Imagesearch restrict.
Real time Statistics and Logs
This is one great feature about Google CSE, with Analytic connected, you get statistics and log regarding searches on your website.