A custom search engine is the tailored version of the generic search engine in which every feature can be altered to fit your website theme and functionality better.
With a custom search engine, you get additional benefits of being in control. What websites should be added to your search results? What should be the specific user experience on your website? What do users look for when visiting your website?
These questions can be answered with a personal touch when your search engine is tailor-made.
Using a custom search engine gives you more control over your search to remove ads and refine your rankings, even managing the frequency of crawl. All of these controls are not available in a generic search engine like Google search and you may need to compromise a lot even when you pay for a plan.
Create a custom search engine for your website
Here is how to customize your search engine
Most websites while starting do not carry an internal search engine at all or if they do, it is not customized and relevant.
In this day and age, with the audience preferring the online model of shopping, the expectations from internal site search have skyrocketed. This highly increases the need for a personalized search engine on your website catering to the needs of your business website.
So, how do you add a custom search engine to your website?
For the most part, you do not need to know how to code or hire a specific team of people to customize your search engine for you.
You do need to have a live website and a working sitemap along with the access to add the code to your website and a Custom Search Provider.
For the customization process, you need to log in to your custom search provider with your Google id and enter your website sitemap and URL. After you choose your nearest data center, you can initiate the crawling process and take a demo.
Make all the custom changes to the website that you need in the terms of look and feel in the UI customization section.
After you are satisfied with the demo, copy the code and add it to the head section of your website. You can now take your customized search engine live.
Build a custom search engine for your website
There are ways to add a Custom Search engine to your website without hassle and coding. This can be done by employing the help of PHP Search-as-Service providers that are generally hosted. All you have to do is generate the code snippet and drop it onto your website.
To add the ExpertRec Custom Search Engine to your website, you need to follow the steps below:
1. Go to https://cse.expertrec.com/newuser?platform=cse to sign up with your Google account.
2. You will receive a prompt to enter the website URL. then you should select the server location closest to you and you can choose to enter your sitemap. In other cases, it will be detected automatically.
3. The crawl will start and meanwhile, you can customize the website UI.
4. Take a demo. It is fully functional.
5. On the dashboard, you will find the code snippet which you can add to your website to take the search live.
There are some Prerequisites to add ExpertRec Custom Search on your website:
1. The website should not be in staging or local host. It is preferred that the site be live.
2. The site should not be behind a login
3. If your site has a working sitemap, this increases the success of indexing all the pages.
You can also choose to put the Google Search engine widget on your website. It offers different plans according to different business needs and also has customization tools.
It comes with a fair share of disadvantages though. Since it is supported by ads, there is a very real probability of it displaying your competitor ads on your website. The speed is slow and you have no wiggle room for the modification of the ranking algorithm or control of the data indexing.
Get the best Custom Search Engine for your website with ExpertRec
There is a very easy and generic way to add site search for your website with the use of the Google Site Search widget. Most websites use this because of the ease of customization and pre-made themes. Different plans according to the business also add to the attraction.
However, the attractive benefits fall short when we consider the disadvantages which weigh out the benefits.
There is no support for the search products on the website whether you use paid or free search. All the technical questions that need to be answered are directed to the public forums making your questions public.
A vast array of annoying ads are displayed and the features provided do not justify the cost.
Benefits of using ExpertRec:
1. You get all the features present on Google Site Search and many more.
2. You have control of the ranking algorithm on your website without needing to learn any coding.
3. The UI of the website is customizable.
4. You receive priority customer support from the support team.
5. The exclusive feature which takes the cake, however, is the option of voice search on supported browsers.
6. Custom Site Search analytics help you analyze the user trends on your website.
FAQs
1. What is a Web Crawler?
A web crawler can be best defined as a web program used generally by search engines to automatically search the documents on the internet. These are programmed to automate the browsing experience through repeated actions.
Search engines benefit from the web crawlers by building indexes through the web browsing actions performed by the crawler.
You can also use the words spider/bots to describe the web crawlers. The most popular web crawler is Googlebot
2. Can I build a Custom Search Engine without knowing how to code?
Yes, you can build a Custom Search Engine without knowing how to code. You need a custom search provider, and a live website with a working sitemap.
Once you enter your website URL, the crawling starts automatically. You can take a demo and
fine-tune the search engine settings.
The coding aspect is taken care of by the custom search provider and you just need to copy the code generated after the customization and add it to your website to take the search live.
3. What is a Programmable Search engine?
A programmable search engine is a tool to include a search engine on the website to provide users with high-quality and relevant search results. There are options to customize the website’s look and feel along with the features like refined search, promotions, and auto-complete.
Create a custom search engine for your website
