Google has just announced the release of a handful of major new features for its Google Custom Search products, including a new set of themes, improved use of rich snippets in custom search, and a new Wikipedia search. The announcements aren’t especially related, but they’ll be welcome news to the millions of sites that have deployed Custom Search.
For those that don’t know it, Wikipedia’s search is powered by Google Custom Search behind the scenes. Update: Google says that Custom search is actually only used if you install the Google Custom search skin. The new Wikipedia skin that they’re launching today is quite slick — it’s inline so you won’t have to leave the page, and it allows you to restrict your search to pages that are linked to from whatever Wikipedia entry you’re reading. This means that while you’re reading a page on the NBA, you’ll be able to do a search for “rockets” and your first match under the “Linked Wikipedia Pages” tab will be for the Houston Rockets, rather than matches from the more explosive use of the word. The only downside to the new search is that it’s a pain to set up: you have to create a Wikipedia account if you don’t have one, and then you have to slightly modify a JavaScript file in your Appearance settings. It’s quite simple and the walkthrough spells it out for you, but it keeps it out of the hands of more casual users.
The next major annoucement is improved support for structured data in search results. Custom Search can take advantage of formats including RDFa, PageMaps, and Microformats. You’ll now be able to incorporate thumbnails and specific actions — say, purchasing an item directly from a result — using this metadata. There’s also support for structured search, which allows users to finetune their queries using tags (for example, I could restrict my search to a specific author, assuming the site I was searching had a metatag that specified who wrote their articles).
Finally, today Custom Search is also rolling out a new set of customizable templates, which let users easily specify how their search results should appear on the page with respect to both layout and theme. There’s also a feature that will allow site owners to automatically redirect mobile users to a site that’s been optomized for smartphones.
I love it when Google focuses on it’s core product. Now if they could just make a direct competitor to WolframAlpha that would be awesome.
These feature releases could help with their search – a lot of buzz about Bing out there and numbers are showing more people defecting….but hey – it’s Google
i think bing’s reference for wikipedia article search with the use of powerset technology is more powerful then custom search.
http://www.bing.com/reference
agreed, very good tool
Not that Google has ever rested on its laurels, but a little competition for them means better search features for us in the long run. I think we will start to see more rapid improvements like this going forward as they try to stay several steps ahead of their competition.
Yes, yes. But what are the five scariest traditional hallowe’en stories?
I thought Wikipedia uses Lucene from Apache group.
Cool features! I really love the themes and Wiki search. G rocks!
Limitations: Users of google custom search or site search are unable to see search queries generated on their embedded code search engines.
Also I would like a way in which some of the URLs you add to bookmarks get added to the custom sources of the custom search engine so you can run a search on your own collected sites or pages. Over a period of time, this can become your knowledge base.
I agree with your point .. it would be grt .. if we could get it that way ..
Best,
Daina
CSE lets you define the subset of the internet you want to search. I wish google took this a bit further on their main search product: let me define the center (ex my blog, or TC, depending on the occasion) and the radius of my search (0= this site, 1=this site and all pages linked from it, etc).
My blog, my blogroll, my firefox history could make good use of such search feature!
CSE has been heading this way for years now, but never got exactly there.
Custom Search can take advantage of formats including RDFa, PageMaps, and Microformats.
Nice! Could anyone provide a link?
http://www.goog...ls/richsnippets
Google moves faster than any body .
http://www.maxo...ineservices.com
I’d love if Google allowed the use of RegEx. Oh, how much I’d love it.
@Panayotis Vryonis
Thank you for this nice link
I already included hCard, hCalendar, GEO and hReview !
Yahoo! Search Monkey is providing nice features with Microformats. We hope that Google would bring a similar platform