All those blogs that live on Blogger, which Google owns since 2003, including by design what is known as Custom Search Engine. This allows visitors to use the famous search engine for queries within the website. To me it was a feature that seemed fully engaged to blogger sites until a few days ago, discussing another issue that will tell you later, I found a control panel that lets you create custom search engines and use them in your web sites. This service not only allows us to add a search control, but also gives us the tools for limit the results to the content of a one or multiple sites, change the look and feel of the text box, control how to display the results and so on.

Create a custom search engine

The first thing to do is to register a new engine using the form of the dashboard through the Add button:

We can add more than one website for each search engine, select the language and restrict pages by type of scheme (schema.org).

If you click on the first option, It will return the JavaScript code must be embedded in the site in order to display the search control. The public URL is an address composed of https://www.google.com/cse/publicurl?cx=YOUR_CX, where YOUR_CX is the user id and the id of the custom search engine.

Customize the search engine

Once created you can select the Control Panel and see all that we can modify:

Configuration

All sections are organized with tabs. In the configuration section is the basic information engine, a component for monetization using Google AdSense, users management, you can change certain aspects of the engine, tasks indexing and advanced options related to the context and associated engine annotations.

Appearance

It is also possible to alter both the search and the control mode in which the results are displayed.

In the Appearance section can modify the design, the theme, customize the font, border color and background and even choose whether you want to show or not thumbnails in the search result.

Search functions

Regarding the search results, we can define certain criteria that will give us a better result for our visitors.

You can create promoted results, restrict keywords, enable autocomplete and even add synonyms of words that we know are used frequently within the scope of the site content.

Company

The last section allows us to remove the ads on the results page as long as the engine is being used in a non-business environment.

Happy searching!