With its recent planned acquisition of YouTube (see Michael’s blog entry on this here), Google is never far from the headlines. It really seems like we can blog about Google all day and still blog about it some more.

In other Google news, one of the newest initiative from Google is the Google Custom Search Engine(Google CSE) which allows web publishers to create custom searches on their sites or blogs (see SMH article ‘Google introduces do-it-yourself search engines’, October 24, 2006 here).

Google Custom Search relies on the same underlying database of websites as the normal Google search, but allows companies or individual users to set up customised online searches by tailoring the search to specified topics and websites to reflect the users’ interests, point of view or area of expertise. Eg: an online women’s magazine may wish to tailor their search to gossip and celebrity news.

This is one way to make searches better by letting people decide what should be searched. It allows users to select which websites, pages or topics they wish to include in their own tailored web search index. You can restrict search results to selected pages and sites, or give your selected sites higher priority and ranking than the rest of the Google index. The benefits include allowing sites to choose for users to only see results from their site or related sites. It also allows sites to be given priority over other sites, as opposed to Google’s relevance ranking system based on popularity.

Google provides the user with a piece of code for the search box to put on their site, and the user has the option to customize the look and feel of the search and results to match their website.

Shashi Seth, product manager for Google Custom Search Engine points out, “Custom search engines empower communities everywhere to organize their own information and make it searchable”. Given the incomprehensibe volume of information that is contained on the internet nowadays, I think this is a good way for making searches more selective and thus having results that are more relevant. Of course the downside is that by selecting specific sites to search you may be missing out on other potentially highly relevant sites and material. Nevertheless I think it’s a very innovative idea, and soon everyone can have their own customised search.

Read more about this on Google CSE’s FAQ.