Google Custom Search - Rajat Mukherjee - Google India SearchMasters '09

Key Takeaways

thanks Paul for such a nice uh welcome um it's actually very special to be in Bangalore because I actually I went to school in Bangalore I uh was a student at St Joseph's and Bishop cotton many many years back it's amazing to see what's happened to Old Madras Road it's just amazing um and um so I'm a Bengali but brought up in Bangalore so that makes me a bang bong so fake in all ways but uh it's really really nice uh to be back back home uh before I get started I want to actually U uh thank the local team here uh Alo Paul uh you know all the folks who put this together uh they spent a lot of time to actually make this a very successful uh conference and so I'd like to take the opportunity and and thank them so let's give them a big hand CL all right so um I'm going to talk about Google custom search but before we get started I just want to get a a feel for you know how many you have actually heard of custom search so show off hands okay very good so that's that's nice and um so so hopefully today uh after my presentation you will learn more about some of the details that you probably are not already aware of and uh please please feel free to stop me at any given point in time during the presentation make it interactive and uh we can go from there so so what is Google custom search Google custom search basically uh offers you the ability to take the Google platform in your hands and we'll talk about that so so um Google custom search allows anybody you Publishers bloggers uh websites organizations businesses to basically leverage the Google search platform that we've created it's a very highly scalable very high uh Precision system that we've created and you can then create a very customized search experience on your own website targeting your audience targeting uh your content your topics your topics of Interest your expertise so the way I think of it I I kind of like to draw this analogy with with pizza so I see now there's lots of nice pizza places here and in fact some of the uh you know some of my friends told me to actually try out this mg Malay Tika Masala that was pretty good actually it's fantastic so you know all these flavors that have come out here it's just amazing but think of the whole pizza as being google.com right so when you're actually searching uh across the internet that's really what google.com offers you what Customs are offers you is a little different uh in the US there's a it's a very common for people to actually take pizza by the slice so you walk into the mall and then you actually you might be in the mood for a little bit of you know chicken and maybe a little bit of Hawaiian pizza so actually you buy two slices so custom surge is like that you take the slices of pizza that you want and you offer that uh to your consumers right so take that to your website these are the slices of pizza you care about and you put the toppings you like and you customize it even further right you want it really hot you can you know add some more peppers and jalapenos and you basically then customize that for for for for for your uh dinner right so custom search is like that so it's built on top of Google search so you get all the benefits of Google Search The Great ranking the great relevance the scalability the up time the latency the speed fantastic and on top of that you then customize it a little bit further you create your slice of the index if you will and you can boost ranking you can say Okay I want these sites to actually rank a little higher because these are my sites uh or these are important on my site and you can also customize the presentation so we have controls over look and feel over colors and the way your site looks and because you're embedding the search experience into your own website we give you those controls and that allows you to embed the search experience for your customers on your website so that is the analogy that I'd like you to take back you know what you want you know what your users want custom search off offers you this great platform allows you to customize it further and offer it to to your customers so again just to reiterate uh in terms of um getting information all you need to remember is www.google.co.in CS CSE standing for custom search engine I often refer to that acronym so if I say CSE that's what I'm talking about but the value proposition actually extends both for you you as an individual or or an organization as well as your community which is the Searchers so on the left hand side you basically have your you the Web Master or you the organization oops so you harness the power of custom search you create an experience for your users you search enable your website you invite your friends members of the community to contribute so that's another feature which is that you can actually have a a collaborative model where multiple people in your organization or in your community can actually contribute and make your search experience better over time and very important also to the success of the product and to the customers is that you can make money from the resulting traffic so you can monetize that search traffic on your website uh we have custom search has been an extremely successful product over the last couple of years we have over a million registered custom search engines so if you don't have a custom search engine on your site and if or if you haven't played with it I strongly recommend that you at least get familiar with the with the product it's very easy to use and then you can create the a search experience in minutes literally minutes on the Searcher side of things this is your community the users that are coming to your website they find information easily at the source they uh for them the search is contextual they're at your site they're looking for a specific amount of information or specific topic of information your site offers that so the search is contextual around that topic and I'll talk a little bit more uh in depth about context and why that's important and of course as I said as part of the community they can also contribute back to the engine if you if you've enable that so at a high level let me talk about why you need to look at using Google custom search why use Google custom search very important point in fact a couple of the examples that Adam uh used during his uh his Clinic um I noticed that they have a little structured search but they don't have a generic search you know an open free free text search uh option on their website and I've seen this across a lot of websites even in India where you don't have a search box on the on the front page the reason that's really becoming important is people are getting used to using search as a way to navigate the moment you have more than 10 15 20 30 pages and of course if you have thousands of Pages search is mandatory but even if you have a a reasonably small site search is becoming a very common way for people to find information you know the the web is moving so fast people have very little time on their hands they want to be able to find information very very quickly so they're always looking for the search box I mean I when I go to a site if I don't see something that I'm looking for on the you know in the first couple of you know a few seconds I'm looking for the search box so because of the popularity of search engines people have gotten used to looking at search as a way to navigate so if you have a website in addition to navigation you want to have people have the ability to search across your website search can be as I said integrated in minutes literally minutes uh using the look and feeli of your own site better user retention we are targeted search we've seen cases where U customers have actually adopted custom search over some proprietary software and overnight they've seen large increases in the number of searches and when I say number of searches number of successful searches you're also talking about people staying on your site longer finding the information and accessing the content on your site longer so if you're monetizing your content using AdSense for Content that's also going to be benefited by uh high quality search and user retention is very important and the other important value proposition that custom custom search offers out of the box is relevance a lot of people have said we've spent months tuning Our proprietary search uh engine uh for quality and relevance but the moment we've turned on custom search we've seen fantastic quality of results out of the box the reason for that is very clear we sit on top of the Google index and Google takes into account all the great ranking page rank anchor text Etc on the web so even though you're searching only a small domain of websites the relevance that we are Computing is built on top of the Google algorithms so out of the box even without any tuning at all or even without boosting or using some of the advanced features of custom search you get really high quality relevance and lots of organizations try it and immediately say wow this is so much better than what we've already you know spent six months developing so you have to really give it a shot and and look to see how it works for your site better click through rates and conversions on your site I will talk a little bit about uh some of the interesting uh experiments around ad click rates and RPMs as well for some of the use cases that we've seen there are some significant increases that you can actually drive through certain features in custom search uh enhanced indexing there were a couple of questions where you know we talked about my site has so many pages but only a small subset of those pages has been uh indexed by Google Now we understand that that could be a problem for certain sites but when you're doing site search on your own site or you're trying to carve out a specific uh section of the index for for searching we know that you need to go deeper because when you have your own pages and you're providing search on your own site you absolutely want to search all those pages so to address that specific need custom search actually has enhanced indexing so we actually have a separate Uh custom search index for uh for our CSS and we also in the at the end of last year created a new feature that we refer to as on demand indexing because we understand that when you're launching a new product you want people to be able to find that on your own side search so you have the ability through on demand indexing to actually give us a portion of your site of of your URLs and we will actually index it into your custom search engine in within 24 hours so so that's a very powerful feature and we have had fantastic feedback once once we launched this because people really found that you know they wanted that kind of control over their own site search features several features are available that you may or may not be aware of we have features like label and I'll talk about that synonyms you have the ability to actually add synonyms for your domain specific sites now this is very important because synonyms on a worldwide basis may actually not apply uh or or maybe you may actually have very specific synonyms on top of what you know people normally use for acronyms for your specific business or industry or specific uh you know uh terms that you use in your on your website uh date biasing we actually have the ability for you to actually control uh the The Ordering of results by date in addition to the other custom search you know boosts that we have provided and you have the ability to promote specific results so for example if you're a travel site I've heard of you know some questions about travel sites you might actually want to promote specific things right on top for specific queries right so this uh we have the ability for you using key matches to actually promote specific things for specific uh queries and these may not even be URLs this may just be information that you might want to provide as I said you can monetize with relevant ads and uh when I say relevant ads we've actually added some features by which you can actually add keywords to your search engine so for example if it's a travel site or a travel search engine you can actually add travel specific keywords travel flights hotels Etc and those might actually help you tune your ads to the topic of your search engine we have advanced apis customization various branding options I had a question today uh at lunch somebody was asking me you know how can I adopt custom search but actually have control over The Branding because it's it's my company and I want to actually have control over branding we actually have offerings around custom the custom search platform which gives you control over branding and over custom further customization you can actually get your results in XML format you can do much more uh presentation control over that and we have tech support as well with the site search the Google site search product is effectively built on top of the custom search platform and very important last but not least it's it's integrated with the Google platform as I said the relevance the goodness of you know search quality uh that we heard about this morning actually comes through right away in custom search so it's integrated with Google search on top of the Google platform but also with Web Master tools and sitemaps so when I talk about um enhanced indexing or the on Dem on demand index the sitemaps is the mechanism that we uh we basically use to get the information in as to what what URLs you think are high priority what URLs do you want to index in the next 24 hours for on demand indexing the same cemac mechanism is offered to you and you just do this once you go to Web Master tools you submit the sitemap and you indicate to us which sitemap you would want to use for on demand indexing you don't have to do additional work and submit anything specific for custom search okay so I want to spend a little bit of time around context because I want you to think about what context makes sense for when you're trying to create a website or a search experience so I think of this as kind of going from a small sphere of influence to a much larger sphere of influence so you your community and your world so what does what does it mean like I have a Blog I have my when I when I think about my personal world I think of you know my blog my bookmarks my search history uh my friends their sites that they're interested in and potentially some search results that I might have bookmarked Etc so that's basically my world and I can create a search experience around this there are actually features in custom search specifically a feature called linked custom search engines which allow me to actually uh dynamically create a a search engine that changes over time so I'll talk about that when when I talk about the Blogger widget but basically you can actually create a search engine around a bunch of links that actually can change over time and the system can actually update it for you automatically so that's one sphere of influence if you go to the next step you're talking about enhancing or expanding that that sphere of influence so what are the topics of Interest so for example I'm a big soccer fan football fan and so I I like to you know find out uh information about what's happening across the the world of football so I actually have created a little search engine that you know searches across a bunch of you know high quality football sites and so that's kind of my topic of interest if you will it's a little Beyond me but you know I can actually share it with friends who actually uh are also interested in football um communities can create these kinds of search engine experiences there are lots of communities that have actually done this and I'll talk about one of them which is very powerful which is the Adobe Health Community uh groups when you have different groups of people you know they can collect information a very good example of this was actually during the the the earthquake in China uh a bunch of googlers actually got together over 2 days and they spent a lot of time to put together a bunch of sites and and create a search engine around them to be able to find lost you know there were lots of bulletin boards Etc that were coming up where people were just looking for information about their you know their family and friends and they just put together search across these sites and even if that helped a few people over those you know over the next week I think they had you know hundreds of thousands of hits on that on that search engine and maybe that resulted in in a few people finding you know more information about their families I think that was an outstanding effort in terms of communities and groups and of course as you uh deliver your products and services to customers they are your community so as a business as an organization as a as a government you actually have a much larger community that you're catering to in fact there are several government sites that I've seen in India which have a lot of content and no search box it's just mind-blowing that we don't have search boxes on some of these very heavy content R sites um and of course your business you want to actually be able to offer your services and have people find them that that's your community and then you go to the next kind of set which is your world of information right this can be you know based on country for example you know a bunch of Bollywood sites that you know are relevant to you know a much larger Community uh in the country or by language you can actually go across countries but by language so for example Spanish is spoken in several countries but you can actually have Spanish related custom search engines that actually span geograph geographical boundaries what I'm trying to make here is that you should think about what your services are who your communities are and what kind of search experience you want to create it does not have to be restricted to the specific site that you that you manage or that you are on so for example you might have sister sites you might have partner sites you might have uh you know a conglomerate that actually has multiple Brands so you can actually very easily create a very comprehensive search experience once you know the communities that you're catering to so just to drive home the fact uh here are some examples so uh where where I'm claiming that you know custom search gives you the tools necessary to create a very contextual search so during the Beijing Olympics uh these are uh slightly dated uh screenshots but they make the point so if you did a search for bolt this was around the time of the Olympics uh there was exactly one result uh I think the last one here on usin bolt who was obviously you know huge uh at the Olympic Games but that's what I would call a generic search result now this is not irrelevant because at that point in time people who are looking on google.com you know this is the over time based on you know what people are looking for the feedback and and the log analysis etc etc page rank etc those are really the the the relevant results that the algorithms have determined but if you look at somebody who's coming to the Olympic site right they are really looking you're they're already directing their their context right you know that they are the Olympic site and they're looking for a specific set of information so what Google did at that at that point in time was they also had a landing page for the Olympic Games and on that landing page we had we create a custom search engine and on that search engine if you did the same search for bolt you can see very easily that you know it basically filters right into the the the topic of Interest which is all about usin boat and a similar uh uh example was uh during the during the elections just prior to the election if you did a search on google.com for nuclear power you get a very high quality set of results you know general information about nuclear power but again Google had a landing page uh for the uh the elections and uh when you did a search for nuclear power on that specific landing page you actually got some very interesting editorialized kind of content about the policies uh you know across the different candidates around nuclear power so what was Obama thinking about nuclear power what was McCain thinking about nuclear power so that gives you a much quicker answer because you know you're on a specific topic of interest and that's the context now what they've also done is they added this these are the labels that I was talking about so very simply you can actually annotate the specific uh you know websites or patterns actually custom search users patterns uh you can actually identify specific labels with these patterns so then you can then drill down so for example if I'm interested in U you know what's happening at the conventions around nuclear power are there any rallies being held you can just drill down into that spefic specific label and restrict your search by that label so that's another interesting feature that you might want to think about because if you've organized or categorized your content you might be able to provide that categorization information to your users whoops that wasn't me so that what context means for you so a few uh examples of custom search in India uh whenever I come to India I love to catch up on the latest uh you know in terms of Bollywood as well as sometimes you know try to try to see how the cricket team is doing because whenever I watch they lose it's kind of amazing of course I did watch that uh the the two um patan Brothers do that wonderful Innings couple of weeks back but um here's a search engine which actually gives you information about guitar cords they've actually con at across a bunch of music sites so if you search for you know information on specific songs you get lyrics information as well as um uh cords information around specific songs here's another site that one of my colleagues alerted me to um this is an opinion site in India and uh here again you can get great reviews around the the latest movies and so I was actually interested in this movie The CH the 6 I'm not sure what the cool way of of saying it is but unfortunately I didn't have the time to actually catch the movie but we do it back home and uh cric Buzz which is one of the cricket sites in India also provides and actually uses the labels as well that I talked about you know a bunch of cricket sites uh information around Cricket so this should give you an idea of some of the things you can do but think about what you are trying to offer to your users and where custom search could play a role okay so now I'm just going to um kind of step into more of the product custom search uh I keep referring to the custom search platform and that's reason the reason is that it really is a platform we've actually delivered custom search in various ways to uh to customers and I'll talk about some of these various Spokes and as I do that instead of talking about specific product features I'll try to highlight some of the features of the product or how you can do things with the custom search Administration console and and show you in the context of these specific implementations so the platform as I said is uh is offered in various ways so think of you know it being uh available to users uh individuals web Masters bloggers a lot of bloggers have actually uh you know adopted custom search and um you have universities nonprofits governments a lot actually some pretty large governments uh actually have adopted uh when I say large governments state governments in the US are also pretty large entities many of them have actually adopted custom search and there have been some announcements on that as well including some national government organizations then we have this category of syndication Partners these are the large Publishers and large publishing houses which actually you know send a lot of traffic uh to custom search but they actually want more customization more presentation controls and they typically get the results in XML format and these are the people who also typically monetize their traffic very heavily so they are really AdSense Partners if you will so that's a category uh you know for for example about.com uh idg New York Times they actually use custom search as well and businesses and governments most of these uh entities typically don't want to show ads they want to have more brand branding controls and they typically go into uh the Google site search product offering and uh so for example the UK Parliament NASA uh ealth insurance which is an uh Insurance uh company in in in the US basically use site search product and as I said they have much more controls and also get tech support new class of applications search enabled applications um for those of you who are not aware uh and I'll talk a little bit more about this but Adobe has actually adopted custom search in a very very Innovative fashion and I'll talk about that I have some screenshots as well and then eventually application developers a lot of our develop developers actually do very Innovative things with customer search so if you look at uh companies like topical and legit they actually offer again you know take advantage of some of the Cutting Edge features of custom search like Dynamic search engines which you know creating basically a sphere of influence around you and creating a search engine around you for your friend you know using your friends links your blogs your Facebook accounts Etc they've done some very interesting things around custom search so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to go back to these examples and I'm going to show you and highlight I'm not going to go through an exhaustive list of features uh you can go to the website and you know uh you know get familiar with it and get a lot of the information there but let me just highlight a few things that might be of interest so here's a here's my personal blog and the point I wanted to make here is that you don't have to write a line of code to actually get a customized search experience on your blog so specifically what happens is we have a blogger widget that you can configure with a couple of clicks and what that offers is a specific Gadget that oops every time I click the the stop button the bottom sorry about that guys okay so okay no there's something wrong with this in line using the Ajax search API and you can just you know cross them out if you don't want the search results and continue reading the blog now the point of this is that it's again very very easy to configure this so this is the the search box widget that is available for bloggers to use on blog on on blogger.com uh and it's very easy it's it's no code to be written it's just you know click two clicks and you're you're off and running this again just to reiterate this uses a very Advanced feature of custom search which is linked custom search engines what why this is relevant is that you're not just searching your blog posts but you're actually automatically searching we we custom search actually extracts all the links that you've created universities um the Colorado State University is an example of a university that's adopted this and what I wanted to point out here is the customized look and feel if you have certain brand colors on your site you can very easily in minutes um offer the the search results in the specific you know colors of your site and the way you do this is a very visi uh kind of editor you just select you know the specific colors and you see the changes right away and you preview and you're done it's it just takes seconds to do do this um again information on custom search in general google.com/ csse you'll get all the information about the features as well as pointers to various resources and the resource site that these uh that these folks have put up for the search um what what was the site search India search Master indias search masters.com actually has a resources site uh page which has a bunch of links that you can also look at so um in terms of syndication Partners many of these Partners actually as I said monetized so I wanted to focus on a couple of things here so here you have of course uh idg owns Mac World which is a very very powerful brand around Mac uh and Apple products and um obviously they use ads and I wanted to talk about ads and keywords but also labels so they've used effectively very very effectively they've used labels so they've created for example uh you know various views on what's popular so iPhone and iPod for example are very popular categories so they've created those categories on the top at the top level but also otherwise you know reviews and blogs Etc so they can actually direct users to what they're looking for so in terms of ads to actually configure um ad if you have already have an AdSense account configuring that AdSense account into a custom search engine is Trivial you just go into the make money Tab and you just associate your AdSense account with your custom search engine and from that point in time you know your searches are monetized and you get a REV share with Google on these clicks on these ad Clicks in terms of refinements again it's a very simple interface you you create a refinement you define the the patterns that map to that refinement and you can manage these refinements now for those of you who are interested in more details on ads and AD sense for search you can go to google.com/ and by the way you can go to google.co.in as well um for for it's an equivalent URL / AdSense AFS AFS standing for AdSense for search as as opposed to AdSense for Content which is typically content ads businesses governments typically use custom I mean you use Google site search and one feature that I wanted to point out here and this is ealth insurance which is a site search customer but one of the features that they have adopted is well let me talk about a few of them so as I said branding is optional uh with the S search product so if they wanted to drop the Google custom search branding or the Google branding they are able to do so and they Li typically license the product and there's a there's a whole bunch of pricing options that I can talk about um ads optional so they can actually drop ads because they don't want users potentially to leave their site they want to stay uh you know keep them on their site um catch key matches key matches is what I was talking about when I said promotions so specifically when you're looking for things like long-term insurance or health insurance they might want to promote specific products or right to the top of the search results and that's what we refer to as key matches and with site search you actually get the results back in XML format so then you have more control over how you might want to actually deliver the results and in fact NL that was also referred to by Adam NL also uses custom search and you can see that their results are very very highly customized and they provide a lot of metadata and mappings on the on the rendering side and again creating these key matches is pretty trivial it's again a very very simple editor you basically Define the keywords that you want to trigger on I'm I'm trying very hard not to hit the red button um and you have the title that you want to provide and specifically the the lines of text or the summary or snippet that you want to provide as well as an optional URL so as I said it doesn't even have to actually be a page that you drive people to although that's typically you know what we recommend now for information on pricing options and what site search offers you in terms of you know the XML results format Etc um ads the the the ads optional uh ads optional branding options Etc you can go to google.com/ search which is pretty easy applications and as I said Adobe has done some very interesting things and I'll talk about that so um go back a bit okay so what Adobe did was um how many of you here are familiar with Adobe applications developers okay that's quite quite a few of you so Adobe as you might might know actually has very powerful Graphics tools and and authoring tools but also they have a fantastic community of developers so a lot of adobe sites developer sites actually have very rich content in terms of designs in terms of tips uh cheat sheets uh tricks uh templates Etc so what adob did was that they created this Adobe community help site and where where what they did there was that they actually took you know thousands of their top developers sites and they actually created a search experience around these developer sites so in addition to the adobe.com content they actually also you know offer you all this developer content and uh through this community health feature what they then did was really exciting was that they took this they took this search experience and they actually embedded this in the Adobe applications in Creative Suite 4 so those of you who have actually upgraded to Creative Suite 4 will actually see these uh I don't know if this is f is is uh is visible on the screen but on the right hand side you see these embedded search boxes and when you search within the application itself you are actually taken to this very customized very developer Rich uh you know you might find your tip that you're looking for right there uh type of experience uh this is what I mean by contextual this is very very contextual within the application they know you're in an adobe application they know you're in Flash so they know what you're looking for and they give you very very targeted information around this community help search and they've done this with Dream Weaver and all the all the applications in Creative Suite um for so this is illustrator so if you have a a publishing platform or an authoring content management platform uh that you that you that you work with then this is a great uh you know vehicle for you to provide your communities and your users an embedded search experience that makes sense for them the Ajax API is actually a very powerful API I showed you an instance of that on the Blogger widget which is that inline experience but the Ajax search API actually gives you a lot of customization if you really want to create a very customized search presentation model around the search results then the Ajax API is something that you might want to look at and the Ajax API allows you to basically create a very very highly configurable look and feel around the results uh and and also a very very uh Web 2.0 Centric kind of experience around search so as an example um this is a legit um which is a kind of a blogger kind of application as well around Uh custom search but they use the Ajax search exper the Ajax search API to create this kind of tabbed uh looking feeli so you can actually click on the the tabs are the refinements or the labels so you can actually create a tab per label and then you can actually drill down your drill down is immediately uh reflected by a click on it Tab and so they offer uh Json apis and JavaScript objects and you can also um monetize using ads so so if you are looking for a very highly configurable presentation model with you know a lot of interactivity then the Ajax API offers this and Ajax API has already got custom search built into in uh built into it all you need to provide is the IDE of the the search engine that you're trying to access so I'm sorry I'm throwing a lot of stuff at you but what I'm trying to kind of get across is that there are lots of options and lots of offerings and you might need to figure out what is right for your organization uh in terms of apis everything all the all the information around apis is available on code.google.com and there's apis for Ajax search as well as for custom search now developers actually as I said have done very interesting things with custom search and I want to talk a little bit about the community aspect of custom search because this is something that for example if you have a Bollywood type site you might actually want to bring people in and discuss and you know create a community where people are contributing you know uh information around the around the sites so this is specifically a a company I believe it's in Germany that uh that offers their their users the ability to create you know topical search engines and so you can see the whole bunch of search engines have been created and the search engines themselves are being rated so now the search engine has become an entity on their site and uh so that's one aspect of the community but there's also another aspect of community that I wanted to focus on which is that built into custom search into the platform self is the ability for collaboration so by definition you as an organization can get you know multiple people in your organization to contribute to the search engine so for example if you're a business and you have multiple departments you can have uh you know a few people from each department actually create and update their search engine for their department so that that's a feature that you you might want to think about exploiting so very quickly to recap what I just told you uh this is more of a sort of a a platform sort of figure I don't want to confuse you it's not very technical but the point I wanted to make here uh without pointing with the with the red button is um you have the Google custom search platform which is built on top of the Google index which is on the left hand side in addition we have the custom search index which gives you deeper and enhanced coverage and also the on demand index which gives you more control over how frequently uh you know specific assets are are crawled by the custom search um sort of indexing pipeline on top you have these various offerings you have site search for businesses you have AdSense for monetization and you have the Ajax API and the CSC apis which give you more control over presentation on the right hand side you have the integration with Web Master tools so specifically sitemaps which we've heard about the XML sitemaps is something that I I strongly encourage you all to look at not just from a point of view of getting you know google.com to understand more about your content but also as you develop custom search engines this is the mechanism that we recommend by which you get information into the custom search engines indicate to us what's important what should be crawled right away and we have some controls that we offer you to make that possible so sitemaps come in through Web Master tools no difference no change in in what you do normally and you just indicate to custom search you know what specific sitemaps you want us to look at for on demand indexing and things should should work uh you know hopefully as as as designed and things would be up and running on your website search Within in a matter of 24 hours so again just to quickly reiterate what I just talked about we have site search which is typically targeting businesses where ADS are optional branding is optional you have XML um result sets and you have technical support you have uh for people who want to monetize their search we really talking about the AdSense AFS product basically the AdSense product these are typically Publishers who have very rich content who want to monetize that search experience this is where keeping your users on your site being able to find the information the pages that they're looking for the content they're looking for is very very vital in terms of both your revenues as well as you know maintaining traffic on your to to your site and uh here you basically get a ref share if you have Associated your AdSense account with a custom search engine it's it's immediate and you start getting uh sharing in the revenues on the ads as well so there's a strong monetization model built into you into this for you and you can create um you know your results typically many of them use um the um iframe model which is that you just embed the if frame with the look and feel uh changes onto your site but if you are a large partner you can also get direct U results in XML format and then for developers again you might want to focus on some of these apis that we offer as well as the capabilities like linked custom search engines or dynamic custom search engines that we offer so you have uh custom API custom search API Ajax search which might be very useful for you to play with create some fantastic applications and if you do that you know please let us know on our user forums we actually have a link right from our website on the the custom search website as well as on the resources page please let us know if you've created some interesting applications or if you have some challenges that we can help address so uh before I finish I just wanted to kind of uh run through um a customer experience this is e- health insurance and this talks to you know why search is so important in terms of the nav as a navigational tool hi my name is John Sal vice president of product management of ealth insurance.com ealth insurance.com is the leading online source of health insurance for individuals families and small businesses in the US our company was the first one to created online shopping experience for health insurance vertical we were an early doctor at Google S search because we knew that Google sight search is a product that consumers have come to expect to find when shopping so not having it was potentially costing us business to demonstrate here are two random website visitors Chris and Austin both customers who want to know if shortterm health insurance includes Dental en vision benefits Chris likes the look and PE of our website and wants to navigate through the links to get his answer Austin on the other hand sees the search box right away and doesn't waste any time let's compare 3 seconds and a answer with Google site search our customers can really find our products and have access to relative information at the same time with Google site search we have been able to gather feedback from our customers this feedback has been a great help to us to design our product progam Chris is still navigating Chris has also now found his information after 32 seconds pretty respectable but certainly nothing close to the efficiency of Google site search I hope you enjoyed our demo test it out with your site and notice the difference let skip that one let me quickly talk a little bit about monetization and keywords so this is U some data from a specific large customer of ours where we did a case study uh what I wanted to focus on here was a feature that we have in custom search that we have uh you know called keywords so with every custom search engine that you define you actually have the ability to provide specific keywords keywords around the topic of your search engine so for example if your search engine is about football you can actually you know put in terms around football soccer football goal Etc and that defines the overall sort of set of keywords that Define the topic of your search engine what we specific CSE we actually use those keywords as hints to actually either narrow down the the topicality of the ad of the ads or even look at other ads that might be uh that might be viable in the auction so this study and I'll just go over a couple of these uh interesting kind of data sets that we've gotten from this from this specific case study the first thing is that when they implemented uh so they had a proprietary search solution that they had built in house and they switched that to custom search so that's the context now the moment they did that the first thing they saw was with CSC they saw much shorter query length so the the query length actually uh was uh was immediately shorter 16% uh you know shorter than well 16% longer with u you know with the with the proprietary solution and the reason probably for that was I mean and the reason that they came up with for this was they actually were able to find things faster with with shorter keywords I think they were just found the search engine was behaving better in terms of relevance and and finding the pages faster and this was not that they were trying to do more queries because actually what they found was that the total number of clicks on the results also went up so earlier uh not the number the total number of actually we also measure not just clicks but also good clicks so there are ways to measure you know the total number of engagements of the user with the results but also whether the user actually found the results or not the second aspect was the ads and the higher Revenue so what they did was they uh added keywords so they did the test with and without keywords and um so so the first part was just you know proprietary versus csse and the second part was csse keywords plus ads so they had a CSE without keywords and a csse with keywords and what they noticed was when they added these the appropriate keywords these were hand tuned keywords they actually had 8.5% greater coverage in terms of the ads as well as much higher uh proser click that is the ads were actually more relevant potentially to their users and the RPM went up significantly by about 23% so they were ecstatic when they actually did this test and the point of this is that when we add the keywords it may actually you know um give you the option to actually provide much better monetization if you already have a csse so for for those of you who actually have csse on their sites you might want to look into this feature and see if you know it actually helps with your revenues so I have a few questions to wrap up and then I can take questions I just wanted to ask how many of you uh in this audience do not have any type of search on your site I don't believe this because I've seen lots of sites and lots of uh you know lots of the lots of the people who actually uh you know entered questions into the uh into the spreadsheet uh you know I actually had I I went and checked out the sites and they didn't have search on the sites now one let me clarify one thing some people have structured databases and in terms of their applications and they have a very structured search so for example I think the site we saw today the travel site actually has search on their site absolutely so they have like the city that they're traveling from the city they're traveling to and so it's a structured search so I'm not talking necessarily only about that application I'm talking about free form search as well so as an example if you look at orbits.com which is a very uh popular travel uh destination in the US they have their structured search but they also have a little search box on top which allows people to just enter free form queries so you can actually just go in and type Hawaii you might not you know type in you might not know know for example that you're actually traveling from place a to place B on so and so date so you're not engaging yet with the application but you might want to just search for you know what's the special on Hawaii right and so they have actually created this search experience which is a combo sear search experience both the the application which is their application that they're uh actually providing but also uh a specific search as a navigational uh tool so let me ask the question again how many of you have a free text search box on your site or don't have a free text search box on your site okay a few more hands how many of you don't have don't have custom search on your site I think people are asleep okay let me ask again how many of you don't have custom search on your site all right good so for those of you who don't have search on your site or who don't have custom search on your site I have a request a homework assignment for you how many of you have 5 minutes ah come on come on how many of you have five minutes you spent 2 hours traveling to this conference hour you don't have five minutes don't have 5 minutes because of the travel okay no no no come on let me ask you this question how many of you have five minutes to spare okay great so you have a homework assignment go look up custom search engine create one for yourself whether it's just for fun you know for your own uh you know topic of Interest your you know your favorite Bollywood sites or you know or your special topics of Interest or your or your universities in fact go and check out your universities that you went to and see if they have search on their site and that's a that's that's an interesting uh feedback as well and I'd love for you to uh play with it um look up the features and you know see if it makes sense for you and you might you might see that it's it's great for your personal use or for your company's use and in fact if your company's site doesn't have search on their site you know you should really be asking the questions as to why they don't have navigation I mean search as a navigational tool