Google is the best-known and most popular search engine and it searches billions of web pages to find matches for the keywords you type in. By and large it does a good job so why would your charity want to make its own search engine? Let’s take two common scenarios:
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.
I do medical transcription. Instead of opening a whole lot of medical specialty files along with Websters and also Google, I wanted to create a single search window that would search in these files for medical terminologies or name of drugs or name of physicians or Cities, etc. Not getting a satisfying answer there would I only resort to a google search or visit a particular predefined website. Now is that possible? The search bar would look quite similar to that of Google but placed inside my Windows XP or anywhere else within my system and not on internet explorer.
That sounds like a sensible use of Google CSE. It’s free and quick to set up so try it and see!
However, I’m not sure which ‘medical speciality files’ you’re alluding to. Not all online medical databases (such as PubMed) are going to be searchable by Google search because Google cannot spider them successfully, they’re too complex.