The site uses WordPress as its content management system (CMS) plus a WordPress plugin called Shopp to handle the store’s catalogue and payments. To begin with I found Shopp difficult to get to grips with: some of its problems were due to using an older version but upgrading didn’t go smoothly; and we had a problem with the payment page getting stuck in a loop. All that’s now been sorted out and the latest version of Shopp seems a lot less buggy. It’s actually not a bad product, with about the right mix of features and simplicity, and well worth considering if you want to sell merchandise and your site uses WordPress.

Getting drop-down navigation menus to work across browsers can be troublesome, but it now works ok thanks to the Multi-level Navigation plugin which turns WordPress’s very basic menu into a drop-down, slide-out version. That was a necessity for the ARISE website because it has a lot of content to navigate.

One of the unfinished features was the slideshow on the home page. I used a jCarousel horizontal carousel to enable lots of content to fit into a smaller area on-screen; clicking on next/previous buttons lets you cycle through the items. I love these carousels, they can be a great way to display news or tell a story.

That makes Manseo a great tool for when you want to find examples of what’s worked for other charities, what’s good practice and what’s being discussed by your peers about any tech topic. Manseo currently searches 259 websites but more are being added by a small team of volunteers (I’m adding some UK and Australian websites).

Volunteers from the Ana Liffey Drug Project choose which websites to add to the Addiction Search Engine. When visitors type in a search query the Addiction Search Engine searches only these sites and, in some instances, the sites that they are linked to. Because addiction is an area on the web that attracts bogus websites, this means that the users of the Addiction Search Engine don’t have to trawl unnecessary or inappropriate websites.

How to set up a search engine with Google Custom Search

It’s quick and easy to set up a Google Custom Search Engine (CSE). Simply visit www.google.com/cse and follow the instructions. If you don’t already have a username and password for Google you’ll need to create an account first. Within minutes you’re able to start adding websites to your own search engine.

Refining the search results

A key feature of Google CSE is the search refinements function. Refinements are labels that can be applied to web sites. They appear as a list of links above search results and allow users to narrow their search. When a user clicks a refinement label, the sites that are labeled are given priority in the results.

How volunteers contribute to this project

It does require a significant level of time to maintain and refine the Addiction Search Engine. It’s important to ensure that the Custom Search is up to date and relevant and this is where having volunteers can be really helpful.

All contributors to the Addiction Search Engine give their time and expertise on a pro bono basis. The Ana Liffey Drug Project currently has six volunteers and all have a background in working in the field of addiction. Volunteers are given limited access to the Addiction Search Engine to add sites and decide which existing ‘search refinement’ labels to apply to those sites.

Significantly, Google Custom Search allows for a capacity of 100 volunteer contributors; therefore, the recruitment of volunteers is an ongoing process and is an area with a lot of potential for development. The input of volunteers in sharing their expertise and energy is crucial to the ongoing success of the Addiction Search Engine.

What difference has the Addiction Search Engine made to the Ana Liffey Drug Project?

A key value of the Ana Liffey Drug Project is that they aim to take a wider role in society – they believe in partnership and have a local, national and international perspective. The development of the Addiction Search Engine has acted as a conduit to quality web based information for the wider community.

It’s allowed them to work in partnership with professional volunteers from outside their own agency. They also collaborate with other respected organisations, via their websites, to help promote quality information and support on issues relating to addiction. Using the web has brought new friends to collaborate with, such as the Swansea Drugs Project, Wales. Plus the Addiction Search Engine is helping to raise the profile of the organisation in Ireland and in other countries.

Advice for other organisations wanting to set up their own search engines

Be specific and identify your niche.

Prepare a plan for how you see your custom search engine developing. Do your research and take a look at good examples from other projects.

Be wary of jargon because the keywords and search queries that visitors to your website might use may not tally with the jargon used in your area of expertise/specialism.

Take time to learn how other Google features can assist your new Google Custom Search Engine. You could use Google Alerts to receive email updates of the latest websites, news items etc to be listed on Google, based on your choice of query or topic. For example, one of the email alerts the Project receives is on the topic of ‘drug addiction’. This lets them know about the latest web sites and articles to appear on Google and they can add the best of these to the Addiction Search Engine.

Measuring the success of your custom search engine

Google Custom Search provides statistics on the use of the Addiction Search Engine. That’s how the ALDP knows that there were 3,982 search queries in February 2008 and a grand total of 12,349 searches so far. The statistics facility, provided by Google, gives a clear picture of the ongoing use and success of the Addiction Search Engine.

You don’t have to have your own website to have a custom search engine. However, if you have your own domain name and webspace you can host your CSE within it. Recently, www.addictionsearch.net has been developed as the new home for the Addiction Search Engine. If you have your own hosting then the free Google Analytics tool can be used to get far more detailed statistics on site usage.

Other indicators of success include the ongoing telephone calls, emails and personal contacts made by people interested in the work of the ALDP having found the website and their specific interest in the Addiction Search Engine.

Advertising revenue

Google by default puts adverts on your CSE but non-profit organisations are allowed to switch them off. Originally the Project didn’t plan to include adverts on the website. However, not for profit organisations need to create revenue too and adverts can create a revenue stream that meets some of the cost of providing and developing the website. The eventual goal is to have a financially self-sufficient website.

The website is too new to gauge whether the revenue will be sufficient. However, between 18th February 2008 and 12th March 2008 the revenue earned from Ad Sense was $52. This could be improved on by ensuring the Ads that appear on the website are efficiently and effectively targeted: there is an option to exclude the URLs of inappropriate ads.

This case study was written by Jason King based on interview notes with Tony Duffin of the Ana Liffey Drug Project.

The Ana Liffey Drug Project

Established in 1982, the Ana Liffey Drug Project was the first ‘low threshold - harm reduction’ type service in Ireland. This model has gone on to be replicated throughout Ireland by many other organisations. Ana Liffey Drug Project was originally set up as an alternative to the dominant abstinence based approach of the day. The project created a welcoming space where active drug users could look at their life and their options for positive change in a non-judgmental environment. The project espoused core principles of ‘Respect, Welcome, Participation and Rights’. These principles still apply today.

Tony Duffin

Tony Duffin is Director of the Ana Liffey Drug Project. Over the past 16 years Tony has focused his efforts on the issues of drugs, alcohol and homelessness. Tony has delivered, managed, designed and led innovative services that work with people actively engaged in problematic substance use. Tony qualified in the Diploma in Drug Dependence from the National Addiction Centre, London, in 1999 and the M.Sc. in Drug and Alcohol Policy, Trinity College Dublin in 2006.

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.

1) You work in a specialist field, let’s say autism. Usually the information you need can be found on just several dozen voluntary sector, government, educational and health websites. However, when you search Google you are presented with page after page of unnecessary results from thousands of websites, making it more difficult to find the specific information you need and wasting your precious time.

2) 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, and your clients have noticed, that it’s easier to find content on your website by searching Google instead. Recently you’ve launched a 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.

Here’s a simple solution to both problems. Google Custom Search Engine is a free service that enables you to create a custom-built search engine. It looks like Google and acts like Google but it doesn’t search the whole Internet, just the websites you tell it to search.

It’s really easy to set up: just get a Google account, give your custom search engine a name and start typing in the addresses of websites to search. If you want to get more complex you can: invite colleagues to contribute more sites to search; refine your searches by categorising websites; and decide whether to include whole websites or just individual sections or pages.

Once you’ve set up your custom search engine you can use it as your private search tool or let your colleagues use it too. You can even insert a search box into your website to enable your visitors to use it; they won’t have to leave your website to see the results of their search which makes it ideal for creating a search facility for your own site.

There’s one major disadvantage to CSE and that’s its lack of serendipity. In other words you are far less likely to stumble upon unexpectedly useful websites or find out about new sources of information while using it. So don’t give up on using the regular Google for your more unusual information needs.

For an example of Google CSE in action take a look at ESL Search and Boatr - two search engines I created for English as a Second Language teachers and the UK’s boating community. I’d like to know if your nonprofit organisation is using CSE, so please leave a comment and the URL for others to see.