How to Create Google Custom Search [Programmable Search Engine]

Google Custom Search Platform (CSE) is an excellent way to create a customizable search engine with all of Google’s search core capabilities.

You can use Google CSE (Programmable Search Engine) to create custom search experiences for your website users or consolidated search for internal teams.

In this post, I’ll cover Google Custom Search in detail, including what it is, a step-by-step guide to create one, and use cases.

What is a Programmable Search Engine?

Google’s Programmable Search Engine’s core purpose is to allow website owners to include search engines on their websites.

For example, brands can create search engines to provide results from their own site or a subset of related sites.

Google CSE is equally helpful for individual users as they can create custom search engines to filter out content or focus on a particular set of resources.

This custom search engine helps visitors find accurate information as it uses Google’s search technology, offering features such as autocomplete.

Plus, it’s completely customizable with a focus on the brand’s look and feel!

That’s why at Geekflare, we use Google CSE to power the site’s search capabilities.

We, at Geekflare, use Google CSE for consolidated search across all websites. It is handy in day-to-day publishing operations and much better than the default WordPress search.

Chandan Kumar, Founder, Geekflare

Even though it is aimed at businesses, anyone can create a custom search engine for their personal use.

Furthermore, you can link your custom search engine to Google Analytics to learn about the user’s behavior.

I found the Programmable Search Engine to be great for different use cases. 

For example, a Reddit user created his own custom search engine to filter out specific programming resources such as W3Schools, Quora, and GeeksforGeeks.

I just discovered Google’s “Programmable Search Engine.” I created my own custom search engine to filter out quora, w3schools, geeksforgreeks, etc!
byu/premepopulation inprogramming

The key benefits of using a Programmable Search Engine include:

• Get relevant, high-quality search engine results
• Showcase it on your site free of cost, or pay a low price for an ad-free experience
• Customize in terms of looks and functionality
• Use advanced controls like Ranking Priority and filtered elements

Step-by-Step Guide to Create Custom Search Engine

Creating a Programmable Search Engine is easy. All you need to do is follow the steps mentioned below.

1. Go to the Programmable Search Engine site.

2. Click on “Get started”.

3. Sign in to your Google account.
4. Now, click the “Add” button or “Create your first search engine!”.

5. In this step, you’ll need to fill in the information in the given form. These include:

• Search engine name → Make sure to give a meaningful name to your custom search engine.
• What to search? → Here, you can choose between two options:
  • Search specific pages or sites
  • Search the entire web
• Search settings —> Choose to enable/disable image search/Safe search

Once all information is provided and options are selected, click on the “Create” button.

You’ll now get a success message that gives you code that you’ll need to insert in the body section.

It also offers the ability to preview and customize the Google CSE.

What Can You Customize?

Google Custom Search engine is highly customizable where you can change:

• Edit Basic settings such as name and description to match your brand preferences.
• Play with Search Features where you can augment results, select regions, add or remove sites, and much more.
• Change the Look and Feel of different elements of the search engine, such as Search Element, Search Result, Promotion, and Hosted page.

These options are only accessible after you create your search engine. You can access customization options by clicking on the search engine name from the Home page.

Additionally, you can also customize:

• Members, through which you can add and remove members.
• Ads that let you set up an API key for monetizing your search engine

Let’s go through each one of these below.

Basic settings

You can change basic search engine settings such as name and description here. Additionally, you can get information such as code, public URL, and search engine ID.

Search Features

This is where you can change search settings comprehensively. Its broader settings include an option to change region, sites to search, sites to exclude, and an option to upload/domain annotations/search engine context in XML files.

Users can access all the search features by clicking “All Search Feature settings”, as shown in the above image, or from the sidebar.

Under all the Search Feature settings, you get to change and customize multiple aspects:

• Refinements: Add refinements to filter results based on provided categories. For example, I added news, software, and tool refinements with varying degrees of priority set to each.

You can also showcase refinements at the top of the search (with a maximum of 16 refinements).

• Promotions: You can take advantage of a customizable search engine by adding promotions at the top of the search results. For example, I added a Tactiq promotion coupon when users search for related keywords such as Tactiq or Tactiq review.

You can see that it shows a sneak peek of what the promotion will look like. 👇

Businesses can add as many promotions as they want. They can target specific keywords or make global promotions on each search.

• Query Enhancement: Add synonyms to user’s queries for an improved search experience.

Businesses can add keywords that tune search results as they describe the subject/content of the custom search engine. Additionally, users can add Query, Web Search extra query terms, and Image Search extra query terms.

• Autocomplete: As Google CSE uses core search engine features, it offers autocomplete capabilities. It’s enabled by default and works well out of the box. However, you can add or exclude custom autocompletions from your search engine.

• Page restricts: Uses knowledge graph entities to restrict search (can be added up to 5 entries).

• Advanced settings: Here, you can toggle or change advanced settings, including:
  • Results sorting by keys specified in metatags, rich snippets markup, and page maps
  • Change web search settings like enabling structured data in results, adding link targets, turning results browsing history on/off, and more.
  • Implement web search restrictions with parameters such as language, results per page, and site search. 
  • Image search settings with similar setting options as “Web search restricts”.

Look and Feel

If you don’t like Google’s default search look, you can change how it feels and looks via options available under “Look and Feel”.

It allows you to change layouts from available options, including Overlay, Full Width, Compact, Two Column, Results Only, Google Hosted, and Google Hosted Popup.

Similarly, you can change themes. Currently, Google CSE offers 6 themes, including:

• Default
• Minimalist
• Green sky
• Espresso
• Bubble gum
• Shiny

Each theme has its own charm, which can be further personalized via the “Customize” section. This is where you can change each search engine element’s font, border color, and background color. You can also turn Google branding on/off.

Use Cases of Google CSE

I found Google Custom Search Engine to be beneficial to businesses in different ways, including:

• Create Topic-focused Search: Google CSE is excellent for finding information based on a particular topic. For example, Geekflare can create a programmable search engine for the tools it offers.
• Create a Site-specific Search: This allows visitors to do a specific site(s)-based search for information available only on a particular website. Internal teams (like ours) often use CSE to find resources available explicitly on their website. On the other hand, you can include your competitor’s sites in the search to run competitor analyses.
• Personal Use: I have found CSE a great way to create your personalized search engine. It can be used by researchers, analysts, content creators, business owners, and anyone who wants to include or exclude specific resources on the internet.
• Embed on Your Site: Since Google CSE can be personalized to maintain your brand’s look, you can embed it on your site to give visitors an easy way to search for content on your website. It’ll also give you insight on what users are looking for (thanks to integration with Google Analytics), allowing you to craft content accordingly.

My Opinion on Google CSE

I believe that it’s the best time to use Google CSE as a way to cater to the search demands of your audience, considering that it eliminates AI-based results.

For blogs or business websites, it opens up a clean and customizable way to deliver search results.

You can buy a plan to eliminate the Ads or monetize them—it’s your choice. I found it extremely useful to use Geekflare’s own resources.

Overall, I highly recommend using Google CSE for both professional and personal use. If utilized properly, it can provide accurate knowledge based on user demands. Plus, it ensures that your brand’s credibility is maintained at a time when AI Overviews are dominating search results, despite providing inaccurate information.