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Posted by Yong Zhu, Software Engineer

As a business person, you probably share the frustration of struggling to gain access to corporate tools and portals that are essential to your job. This can be as simple as a budgeting tool your predecessor forgot to extend your ownership privileges to, login details for a corporate microblogging account, or maybe even the control panel you need to access to customize your website search engine.

We'll be the first to admit that ownership transfer historically hasn’t been easy with Google Site Search (GSS). In fact, we used to require GSS owners to completely recreate their search engine in order to assign a new owner. Thankfully, we've just announced major simplifications to this process. Adding a new owner is now as simple as clicking a button and adding your new owners contact details - quick and easy as it should be.


Read our custom search post for more details.
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A good product is like your favorite pair of shoes – it sees quite a bit of use, takes a few scuffs, and sooner or later is due for a shine. Google Site Search is used by thousands of companies across the globe, and based on product use, customer feedback, and a general desire to make things easier, we recently decided that we’re due for our polishing. So we’re shining Site Search up by simplifying the way we charge for our service.

To date, we’ve charged for Google Site Search based on both the number of submitted search queries and the number of pages indexed. We noticed that many of our users had a difficult time estimating the number of pages included in the scope of their search engine, so we are introducing a new pricing system that factors only the quantity of submitted queries your Google Site Search engine receives each year. Now our pricing is much simpler and scales to accommodate the size of your business. The vast majority of our users will be unaffected and many will even begin paying less when the new prices take effect upon their annual renewal.


Please note: This pricing change applies to all new
subscriptions and renewals as of November 12, 2010.

And to give your website a little extra shine, we are now doubling our on-demand indexing quota for all subscription plans, so new web pages added to your site will be quickly indexed and made searchable. So get out that elbow grease and join us in improving search on your website!

For more information on pricing, please visit the Google Site Search website and Help Center articles.

Posted by Guillaume De Zwirek and Clay Maffett, Google Site Search team
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Editor’s note: Today’s guest post comes from Chris Poe, Engineering Director at JibJab Media. JibJab.com is a digital entertainment studio that creates, produces and distributes humorous online content. From offbeat eCards to personalized videos and satirical viral videos, JibJab is on a mission to help more people share more laughs than any other company in the history of the world.

We could all use a good laugh from time to time. Which is why we’re thrilled to announce that, as of today, search on JibJab.com is powered by Google Site Search, making it even easier for our visitors to explore and find their favorite funny items:



In evaluating a website search engine, we chose Google Site Search for its ability to help users find the perfect eCard or video, fast, while allowing our developers to control the look and feel of the results. We also appreciated the fact that Google Site Search provided XML results for full customization of each search query, and gave us a hands-free search solution that requires little-to-no custom maintenance.

This, hopefully, will allow our visitors to find more of what they’re looking for on our site - good laughs!

Posted by: Rajat Mukherjee, Group Product Manager, Google Enterprise
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One of our most popular feature requests has been to add autocompletion of queries to Google Site Search. In recent months, many top websites have begun to provide search suggestions as you type, an innovative feature users are coming to expect as part of a quality search experience. Today, we announced at Google I/O that you can now enable query autocompletions for your search engine.

Travelocity.com is one of the first Google Site Search customers to implement autocompletions on their website. By doing so, they have provided an easy way for Travelocity users to explore and discover new destinations by suggesting the most popular queries based on the first few letters the user inputs.


To turn this feature on, please check the "Enable autocompletions" option in the Basics tab of your search engine. It may take several hours to start seeing autocompletions once you enabled them in the control panel.

For more information about how to turn on autocompletions for your Google Site Search engine, see our autocompletions Help Page.

Autocompletion is compatible with other new Google Site Search features including themes and mobile search capabilities – which can significantly enhance your users’ mobile experience. As with all Google Site Search features, every new development is rolled out free of charge for all customers.

You can learn more about these and other exciting new features by joining an upcoming webinar:

Tuesday, June 15, 2010
10:00 a.m. PDT, 1:00 p.m. EDT, GMT 06:00

Posted by Clay Maffett, Enterprise Search team
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Recently, we showed you how Google Site Search Themes can help you customize the look and feel of your website’s search engine with just a few clicks. We know it’s just as important to be able to quickly and easily modify the format of search results so they appear exactly as you’d like.

With Google Site Search's new data rendering features, you can enable the return of search results in whatever format you’d like. You can control the size and position of images, personalize the attributes that are shown, insert lines of metadata into search results, and much more.

You can find more about the technical implementation details on the Google AJAX API blog, and can add Google Site Search to your website by visiting google.com/sitesearch.

Posted by David Gibson and Nicholas Weininger, Software Engineers
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Editor’s note: Today’s guest blogger is Mark Nichoson, Product Manager at Adobe Community Help.

Back in 2008, Adobe began to use the power of Google Site Search to “plug the whole community brain trust right into the Creative Suite,” as we liked to say.

Now with the launch of Adobe® Creative Suite 5, we’ve taken that brain trust to a whole new level with the introduction of our new Community Help application. It’s an Adobe AIR®-based companion that’s automatically installed as part of any new Adobe CS5 product.

Launched directly from the Help menu of any CS5 product, the Community Help application enables customers to:
  • find fast answers with powerful new search options that let them focus results to just Adobe content, community content, developer resources, or even code samples
  • download core Adobe Help and language reference content for offline viewing (thanks to the Adobe AIR runtime)
  • see what the community thinks is the best, most valuable content via ratings and comments
  • share their expertise with others and find out what experts have to say about using their favorite Adobe product
Google Site Search: integration and innovation
Under the hood of the Community Help app lies our Google Site Search engine. This search engine searches across about 3000 sites – content such as product Help, language references, Tech Notes, Developer Connection articles, and Adobe TV videos as well as the best online content from the Adobe community. Content is chosen by experts at Adobe and in the design and developer communities, meaning customers find the answers they need faster.

Thanks to the robust Google Site Search APIs, the development team was not only able to easily integrate search results but also create unique innovations such as our new Code Search functionality. Formerly known as Blueprint, this new search option allows Adobe Flash® and Flex developers to search for relevant code samples so that they can write better code, faster.

A new definition of Help
By combining the best community content with the definitive reference that customers traditionally expect from Adobe, Community Help allows us to expand the definition what help means. Now users can tap into an entire ecosystem of content — one that can dynamically adjust to changing user needs and provide a much richer set of resources over the lifetime of the product.

Community Help can also be used as a standalone application. To give it a try, you can download it from adobe.com.

Mark Nichoson, Product Manager at Adobe Community Help

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If you’d like to learn more about what Google Site Search can do for your website, join us for this upcoming webinar:

Thursday, May 13, 2010
11:00 a.m. PDT, 2:00 p.m. EDT, GMT 07:00
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When our users add Google Site Search to their website, they expect the same relevance, intuitiveness, and response time that’s delivered with Google.com search. As a website owner, you want to leverage the power of Google search while still staying within the unique look and feel of your site’s design, and Google Site Search Themes allow you to modify the appearance of search results to more closely match the overall styling of your website.

Google Site Search users can easily set up their themes through the admin control panel, which also manages everything from refinement labels to On-Demand Indexing. By clicking on the "Look and Feel" tab, you can choose between three primary layouts and six styles for your Google Site Search. Each style has a unique color scheme, text format, and search box appearance to fit in with the rest of your site.

If you love a style, but need to tweak it, you can customize it further by changing fonts, colors, backgrounds, promotion settings, as well as interactive features such as tabbing and mouse-overs. The preview function instantly shows you the effects of your changes, so you can keep iterating until your search results look just right.

What’s more, Google Site Search allows for further customization through a number of different features and capabilities such as the XML results feed, JSON, or our brand new custom data rendering features – tools that web developers with programming experience can use for more advanced results. With Themes, however, you can make major layout and formatting changes to your search experience right through your control panel, without having HTML, CSS, or JavaScript editing.

Google Site Search is constantly adding new features. We recently added mobile support for Custom and Site Search as well as support for rich snippets and easier synonym management, among many other enhancements made in 2009. Needless to say, we have ongoing new features and enhancements planned for 2010.

See how easy it is to put the power of Google search to work for your website.

Posted by Clay Maffett, Google Site Search team
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As more and more people switch to smart phones as their primary entry point for browsing the web, businesses are looking for ways to help mobile visitors find the right information, fast.

That’s why the Google Site Search team has made it easy to enable users to search your website from devices like Android-powered phones, iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, and Palm Pre.

As a Google Site Search customer, you can repurpose your content to mobilize your web site. You can use the Site Search home page that we create for you as the preferred mobile entry point for your website. All the Google Site Search features - themes, result biasing, promotions, refinement labels, rich snippets, synonym enhancements, etc. – are available on the mobile version as well.

Additionally, if you customize Google Site Search on your website, those features will show up on your mobile home page. If you select or change the theme for your search engine, your mobile home page will automatically pick up those changes. Mobile results will also display thumbnails and actions if you have marked up your pages.

Learn more about these and other features at google.com/sitesearch.

Posted by Anna Bishop, Google Site Search team
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Earlier this year, we announced support for Rich Snippets in Google Site Search results. If you provide in-page metadata markup via RDFa, Microformats, or PageMaps, Google Site Search extracts the metadata and returns it as PageMaps in your XML results, so you can render this structured data in your search results. Rich snippets enable website owners to customize the user interface and expose images, ratings, authors and other interesting pieces of metadata with search results.

Today, metadata support in Google Site Search just got a whole lot better. We now provide the ability for website owners to use these metadata attributes and provide refinement options on the front-end.

For example, website owners can build a rich search interface that not only allows users to search on keywords but also refine the search results based on the author of the document, user rating or othermetadata attributes.

We've enabled a way for you to restrict your search results via use of a special operator. Let's say that you wanted to restrict the results to those results that were authored by a specific author, e.g., "typicaluser". We can do this easily by adding the following restriction in our search query: [economy more:pagemap:document-author:typicaluser]. This gives us exactly what we want – all of the documents with keyword economy and authored by "typicaluser".

We've also recently launched a Rich Snippet preview tool. This tool allows you to view not only the Rich Snippets markup recognized for Google web search, but also the additional customized markup that we support in Google Site Search. You can immediately preview how your web page will be processed after indexing, and whatmetadata attributes will be returned in PageMaps in your Google Site Search results.

For more information on Google Site Search, please visit Google Site Search.

Posted by Nitin Mangtani, Lead Product Manager, Google Enterprise Search
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We know that businesses want website search solutions that are easy to implement, require little maintenance, and consistently return the best search results, without requiring time-consuming manual refinements. We also know that there can be times when businesses want additional control over the search they offer on their websites. That's when two important features in Google Site Search come in handy: "top result" and "date biasing." We want to highlight those today.

Google Site Search lets you customize search results in several ways to make sure items you want featured reach the top of the results list. With top result biasing, you can target the top search results from specific sections of your website (such as your product catalog or newsletter sign up page) to make sure visitors can find the most relevant pages within your site.

Site admins can also choose to organize search results based on the age of the documents with something we call date biasing. If you want to make sure that, say, a new PDF makes it to the top of the results rather than an outdated version, you can switch on date biasing and decide the level of influence (low, medium, high or maximum) so visitors can easily find the most recent version.

These are only two of the suite of customization features that are available with Google Site Search. To learn more, visit google.com/sitesearch.

Posted by Anna Bishop, Google Enterprise Search team
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Studies consistently show that good website search keeps people "on site" longer and improves conversion rates when it's time for business. But even without the evidence, common sense suggests that people get more satisfaction out of their web experience when they find what they're looking for – the information that's most relevant to their search. Algorithms do a great job with this, but sometimes, site owners and admins know their customers – and their content – well enough to think beyond the algorithm and help searchers find that one link that delivers the goods.

That's where Google Site Search Promotions – the latest enhancement to Google Site Search – comes in, starting today.

Google Site Search Promotions allows website owners and admins to create special results that appear as the first result to a user's search, and define the search terms for triggering those results. That raises a specific page, or URL to the top of the search results when those search terms are used, presenting viewers with a more detailed, illustrated link that stands out among the other results. Any URL can be promoted – it doesn't need to be specified as an included site or page in your Sites tab.

Promotions are easy to manage, simply by creating and uploading a promotions file or using the promotions page in the GSS control panel. You can include of a brief description and image for each promotion, and you can add or edit these additional items as well as appearance elements such as border and background color, just by using the Promotion Design Settings menu.

As this screenshot shows, Promotions make it easier to highlight key events, announcements, services or product launches on your visitors' search results. In this example, eHealthInsurance.com's administrator "promoted" the most relevant link, added an image and a two-line description, and enabled the most relevant search result to be displayed first.





Although this functionality has been available to GSS users through subscribed links, today's changes make promoting the best links more speedy and intuitive, and allow admins to add multiple promotions for the same query.

Stay tuned to this blog for upcoming enhancements to Google Site Search (and more). We hope you like the business results that this new Promotions feature delivers.

Posted by Nitin Mangtani, Lead Product Manager, Google Enterprise Search










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Today, we announced Rich Snippets for Google web search, a new presentation of snippets that highlight structured data embedded in web pages. Rich Snippets provide summary information, including important page-specific attributes, to help users quickly identify result relevance. Experiments on Google have shown that users find the additional data valuable – if they see useful and relevant information from a web page, they are more likely to click through to it. Our web search team is currently experimenting with a limited set of attributes for reviews and user profiles that webmasters can provide through in-line markup in their web pages by using open standards such as microformats or RDFa.

Since Google Site Search leverages our web search platform, Google Site Search customers can benefit from this new functionality as well. In fact, Google Site Search customers can define their own custom attributes that we'll index and return with your site search results. In addition to microformats and RDFa, you can also provide custom metadata within your webpages via special markup called page maps. A page map identifies specific attributes that are recognized and preserved by Google at index time, and returned along with search results for presentation to the user.

So if you're using Google Site Search on your website, you can now control further how your content appears in search results. You can showcase key information, such as image thumbnails, summaries, ratings in your result snippets if you provide the appropriate markup on your pages.

Rich Snippets attribute information for Google Site Search is only returned in XML (via <PageMap> tags), so you can use your own customized presentation controls. Indexing of the rich snippets information can have unspecified latency, as some pages are indexed and refreshed more frequently than others, and page map attributes may not be indexed from all web pages.

As an illustration of Rich Snippets, the web page featured in the following example provides custom information about an image thumbnail that is displayed in the rich snippet of the result along with date, author and category information.


If you are getting results back via XML, then the custom attributes are returned in the results within the PageMap tag, as shown below. You can parse the DataObjects within the PageMap tag and provide customized presentation of the relevant attributes.

If you are new to Google Site Search and would like to provide Google quality search results on your website, visit www.google.com/sitesearch
Posted by Nitin Mangtani, Lead Product Manager, Google Enterprise Search


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