5 ways you could use Google Custom Search

I’m at the Making Links conference in Sydney, Australia. It’s a forum for workers from non-profit organisations to get together and share skills and information about IT, web development and using technology.

I’m about to give a short presentation on how nonprofits can use Google Custom Search Engines (CSE) to quickly build their own free tools based on Google’s extremely popular search engine. I’ve written about Google CSE before but I’d like to share the five examples I’ll be giving at the conference.

1) A research tool for your staff

You work in a specialist field, let’s say autism. Usually the information your staff abnd volunteers need can be found on just several dozen voluntary sector, government, educational and health websites. However, when you search Google they are presented with page after page of unnecessary results from thousands of websites, making it difficult to find reliable information and wasting precious staff time. Set up a CSE to make it quicker to find the information you need and then share its URL with your colleagues. You could even give several trusted colleagues permission to add websites to the list of those searched to make the process more democratic. For example, I created this ESL custom search engine for teachers and learners of English as a second language.

BUT: When looking for more obscure topics you should also search the regular Google or you may be missing out on the best sources of information.

2) A search facility for your website

Let’s say you have a search facility on your website. It searches only your own website and it doesn’t even do a very good job of that. You’ve noticed that it’s easier to find content on your website by searching Google instead. Maybe you’ve launched a separate blog and discussion forum and you’d like your visitors to be able to search them too but you don’t want to have three separate search boxes. Set up a CSE that searches only your own website and (by copying and pasting some code) integrate it into a page on your site. Here’s CSE in action on the Ectopic Pregnancy Trust website.

BUT: Google may not find very recently published pages.

3) Assess your competitors’ web performance

Do nonprofit organisations have competitors? Absolutely they do. They’re in competition for funding, donations and projects; there’s only so much money to go round and the best-known and best-regarded charities are most likely to reap the rewards. So how does your website perform compared to those of your competitors? Set up a CSE that searches your own website and up to a dozen similar charities and private agencies. Now type in keywords for your area of work - words that you hope the public and professionals would use to find you - and see who comes out on top of the search results.

BUT: Although this test will flag up problems with your website’s performance, it won’t explain what the problems are, so show the results to your web designer or an expert in search engine optimisation.

4) A local community search engine

Are you linked in to a lot of other local organisations? For example, are you an umbrella or third-tier organisation? Do you keep a directory of your member organisations and their websites? Or are you part of a local partnership? If so, how about setting up a CSE to offer a way of searching all your partners’ or members’ websites through a single website. Take a look at The search engine for Brighton and Hove which actually uses a costly bit of Google hardware rather than the free CSE but the principle is similar. Then read this presentation about how SCIP set up the Brighton search engine.

BUT: It’s not always easy to get agreement on joint ways of working and this can be undermined if one or two partners pull out or if their website is not crawlable by Google.

5) A quality information tool for the public

The Ana Liffey Drug Project has used CSE to create the Addiction Search Engine, to help people find information relating to addiction and drug related issues. They’ve invited volunteer contributors to help them build up the resource. What makes this a great idea is that they work in a field that’s a potential minefield of mis-information and a CSE can signpost their users to the quality information resources.

BUT: Try to be as open as you can about how you include websites and restrict searches and if you have a network of volunteers contributing websites to the CSE make sure they understand your inclusion policy.