With Google custom search, you can create a search engine for your own website or blog. You can configure it to search images along with web pages. You can also filter the ranking or customize how the search results will be displayed.

With Google custom search, you can even create your own custom search engine. If you have a Google AdSense account, you can even earn from this very own search engine of yours.

To insert this search box, simply add a piece of code to your site. A great thing is that Google custom search is free.

Wondering how you can create the Google custom search engine? There are two possible ways for that:

1. Through the control panel

• For this, you must sign into your Google account and then visit the control panel.

• From the sites to search section, add the pages you wish to include in your search engine. You can add any URL you want.

• On the basis of the URLs selected, the name of your search engine will appear automatically. You are also free to change that name anytime later.

• You can change the language of the search engine too.

• Once you are done with everything, just click on “Create.”

2. By creating an XML files

This method is a little difficult, especially if you are not good at website development. To add a custom search, you will have to download the XML files and customize them. You might have to make a few attempts here to finally reach to the changes you are looking for. You can also modify these changes whenever you want.

Benefits of Custom Search

When it comes to website optimization, there are some benefits of Google Custom Search that you might want to consider:

• This search engine will let the user search a specified collection of pages and sites. If you don’t want to make them land on your competitor’s pages, you can do that too.

• A user can search images.

• The look and feel of the search results can be customized according to just the way you like. You can also add auto-completion as the user types in keywords.

• You can add promotions to the search results.

• To further customize the search results, you can structure the data.

• You can make money whenever a user clicks on the pages from the search results. This could be done by using Google AdSense.

After successfully creating a Google custom search box for your website, you can either embed the search function directly to your site or use the page to show results to the user. Using custom search element control API, you can embed the search box in your web pages with JavaScript. On the other hand, if you use the JSON API, it will let you develop the website and programs for restricting and displaying the search results programmatically.

Google custom search is a free product that supports ads which is why it is an attractive choice among small website owners. It’s also best for non-commercial sites.