What is a Custom Search Engine?
A custom search engine is one that can be created by anyone. The developers can choose which websites to add to the search engine and limit the results to only those domains. The conventional way to go about it was to take a for from an existing open source project like Solr or Elastic search and then build the required features and the UI to add to a website. But to build a custom search engine with PHP is by no means an easy task and would often involve heavy developer costs.
Create a Custom Search Engine
Making a search engine is easier than ever before. You may be looking to build a custom search engine with PHP but hosted search-as-a-service providers taking up the pain of building most of the search engines, the end-users’ role is limited to adding an HTML code snippet on their website to take the search to live.
Here we will visit the steps required to add the ExpertRec Custom search engine to your website. This is one of the easiest setup processes of all the available options out there and is highly recommended.
- Navigate to https://cse.expertrec.com/newuser?platform=cse and signup with your Google ID.
- Enter your website’s URL when prompted. You can select a server location near you and add the URL of your sitemap if you wish to. These will be auto-detected otherwise.
- You can play around with the settings and customize the UI as the crawl runs. Once it is complete, you can check out a fully functional demo before taking the search to your website.
- You can take the search to your website with little to no effort. All you need to do is to paste the code snippet available on the dashboard on your website.
ExpertRec comes with more customization options that you can explore. You can read this article to find a more detailed guide on the installation and configuration.
