Disclaimer: As of 2007-03-05, I am an engineer at Google, working on Google Custom Search Engines. This is a personal page, not a work page. So sue me instead of Google if you don't like what you read below. That said, I'm a post-IPO Google employee, and suing me is probably a waste of your time.
I have just launched my personal CSE website. You can find it at http://csegurus.org, or at it's older sort-of temporary location on the komarix.org domain: http://cse.komarix.org. Right now, the only useful material there is about Linked CSEs.
A Google Custom Search Engine is a tool that unites your expertise and energy with Google's search infrastructure. As an example, consider that few of our engineers are experts in vegetarian and vegan cuisine (though many of our chefs are, thankfully). It seems unlikely those engineers will build a specialized search engine for these specialized foods. However, with Custom Search Engines we have enabled Susan Voisin to create Veg Blog Search, a search engine that covers vegetarian and vegan blogs.
There's a lot of these Custom Search Engines around these days. I'll list a few to help you brainstorm where you can contribute:
For any particular Custom Search Engine, you can volunteer to contribute (if the creator allows it). Or maybe you want to create your own Custom Search Engine? The web is your oyster.
More details later -- in short, use this extension to search the outgoing links from any webpage. After installation, there will be a crappy icon/button in your status bar (a "G" with a chain-link under it). Directions: go to a webpage with interesting links, e.g. http://news.bbc.co.uk or http://slashdot.org. Click the crappy icon/button to open the SearchEverywhere search bar, then play around until the options make sense.
Important Note!: This extension is now availabe at the official Mozilla Add-ons site. If you have installed it from anywhere besides the official site, you probably want to uninstall the old non-public version, then visit the new official Search Everywhere page at http://addons.mozilla.org.
I got an itch to learn Greasemonkey the other night, and for lack of a better project made a little quicklink status bar for Google Custom Search Engines. Here's a screenshot:
You would see this info when you visited any webpage related to my Pet Rats search engine. You can easily make a query with the searchbox (hit enter after you type your query). The "gadget" link is an easy way to add the search engine's Custom Search Gadget to your Google Personalized Homepage.
Because I visited my own search engine, I was shown my statistics (7 searches today, 7 searches this week, 31 searches this month, and 133 searches since it was created). If I used the Google Custom Search Engine at Macworld's web site, I would see (0/0/0/0) for the statistics, since I don't own that search engine. The remaining links and information are useful for managing the search engine, if you own it.
To use this tool, you need to be running Firefox as your web browser, and have the Greasemonkey Add-on. Then simply click here to install my Google Custom Search Quicklinks tool. If you have any problems, please feel free to email me.
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