Google Site Search is polishing its pricing structure

A good product is like your favorite pair of shoes – it sees quite a bit of use, takes a few scuffs, and sooner or later is due for a shine. Google Site Search is used by thousands of companies across the globe, and based on product use, customer feedback, and a general desire to make things easier, we recently decided that we’re due for our polishing. So we’re shining Site Search up by simplifying the way we charge for our service.

To date, we’ve charged for Google Site Search based on both the number of submitted search queries and the number of pages indexed. We noticed that many of our users had a difficult time estimating the number of pages included in the scope of their search engine, so we are introducing a new pricing system that factors only the quantity of submitted queries your Google Site Search engine receives each year. Now our pricing is much simpler and scales to accommodate the size of your business. The vast majority of our users will be unaffected and many will even begin paying less when the new prices take effect upon their annual renewal.

Please note: This pricing change applies to all new
subscriptions and renewals as of November 12, 2010.

And to give your website a little extra shine, we are now doubling our on-demand indexing quota for all subscription plans, so new web pages added to your site will be quickly indexed and made searchable. So get out that elbow grease and join us in improving search on your website!

For more information on pricing, please visit the Google Site Search website and Help Center articles.

Posted by Guillaume De Zwirek and Clay Maffett, Google Site Search team

JibJab helps visitors find their online funny bone with Google Site Search

Editor’s note: Today’s guest post comes from Chris Poe, Engineering Director at JibJab Media. JibJab.com is a digital entertainment studio that creates, produces and distributes humorous online content. From offbeat eCards to personalized videos and satirical viral videos, JibJab is on a mission to help more people share more laughs than any other company in the history of the world.

We could all use a good laugh from time to time. Which is why we’re thrilled to announce that, as of today, search on JibJab.com is powered by Google Site Search, making it even easier for our visitors to explore and find their favorite funny items:



In evaluating a website search engine, we chose Google Site Search for its ability to help users find the perfect eCard or video, fast, while allowing our developers to control the look and feel of the results. We also appreciated the fact that Google Site Search provided XML results for full customization of each search query, and gave us a hands-free search solution that requires little-to-no custom maintenance.

This, hopefully, will allow our visitors to find more of what they’re looking for on our site - good laughs!

Posted by: Rajat Mukherjee, Group Product Manager, Google Enterprise

Announcing Autocompletions for Google Site Search

One of our most popular feature requests has been to add autocompletion of queries to Google Site Search. In recent months, many top websites have begun to provide search suggestions as you type, an innovative feature users are coming to expect as part of a quality search experience. Today, we announced at Google I/O that you can now enable query autocompletions for your search engine.

Travelocity.com is one of the first Google Site Search customers to implement autocompletions on their website. By doing so, they have provided an easy way for Travelocity users to explore and discover new destinations by suggesting the most popular queries based on the first few letters the user inputs.

To turn this feature on, please check the "Enable autocompletions" option in the Basics tab of your search engine. It may take several hours to start seeing autocompletions once you enabled them in the control panel.

For more information about how to turn on autocompletions for your Google Site Search engine, see our autocompletions Help Page.

Autocompletion is compatible with other new Google Site Search features including themes and mobile search capabilities – which can significantly enhance your users’ mobile experience. As with all Google Site Search features, every new development is rolled out free of charge for all customers.

You can learn more about these and other exciting new features by joining an upcoming webinar:

Google Site Search: 10 New Features to Put to Work on Your Site

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

10:00 a.m. PDT, 1:00 p.m. EDT, GMT 06:00

Register here

Posted by Clay Maffett, Enterprise Search team

"Made-to-order” results with Google Site Search

Recently, we showed you how Google Site Search Themes can help you customize the look and feel of your website’s search engine with just a few clicks. We know it’s just as important to be able to quickly and easily modify the format of search results so they appear exactly as you’d like.

With Google Site Search's new data rendering features, you can enable the return of search results in whatever format you’d like. You can control the size and position of images, personalize the attributes that are shown, insert lines of metadata into search results, and much more.

You can find more about the technical implementation details on the Google AJAX API blog, and can add Google Site Search to your website by visiting google.com/sitesearch.

Posted by David Gibson and Nicholas Weininger, Software Engineers

Adobe Community Help and Google Site Search: Making search come alive in CS5

Editor’s note: Today’s guest blogger is Mark Nichoson, Product Manager at Adobe Community Help.

Back in 2008, Adobe began to use the power of Google Site Search to “plug the whole community brain trust right into the Creative Suite,” as we liked to say.

Now with the launch of Adobe® Creative Suite 5, we’ve taken that brain trust to a whole new level with the introduction of our new Community Help application. It’s an Adobe AIR®-based companion that’s automatically installed as part of any new Adobe CS5 product.

Launched directly from the Help menu of any CS5 product, the Community Help application enables customers to:

• find fast answers with powerful new search options that let them focus results to just Adobe content, community content, developer resources, or even code samples
• download core Adobe Help and language reference content for offline viewing (thanks to the Adobe AIR runtime)
• see what the community thinks is the best, most valuable content via ratings and comments
• share their expertise with others and find out what experts have to say about using their favorite Adobe product

Google Site Search: integration and innovation

Under the hood of the Community Help app lies our Google Site Search engine. This search engine searches across about 3000 sites – content such as product Help, language references, Tech Notes, Developer Connection articles, and Adobe TV videos as well as the best online content from the Adobe community. Content is chosen by experts at Adobe and in the design and developer communities, meaning customers find the answers they need faster.

Thanks to the robust Google Site Search APIs, the development team was not only able to easily integrate search results but also create unique innovations such as our new Code Search functionality. Formerly known as Blueprint, this new search option allows Adobe Flash® and Flex developers to search for relevant code samples so that they can write better code, faster.

A new definition of Help

By combining the best community content with the definitive reference that customers traditionally expect from Adobe, Community Help allows us to expand the definition what help means. Now users can tap into an entire ecosystem of content — one that can dynamically adjust to changing user needs and provide a much richer set of resources over the lifetime of the product.

Community Help can also be used as a standalone application. To give it a try, you can download it from adobe.com.

Mark Nichoson, Product Manager at Adobe Community Help

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If you’d like to learn more about what Google Site Search can do for your website, join us for this upcoming webinar:

Google Site Search: an introduction

Thursday, May 13, 2010

11:00 a.m. PDT, 2:00 p.m. EDT, GMT 07:00

Register here

Site Search Themes for out-of-the-box customization

When our users add Google Site Search to their website, they expect the same relevance, intuitiveness, and response time that’s delivered with Google.com search. As a website owner, you want to leverage the power of Google search while still staying within the unique look and feel of your site’s design, and Google Site Search Themes allow you to modify the appearance of search results to more closely match the overall styling of your website.

Google Site Search users can easily set up their themes through the admin control panel, which also manages everything from refinement labels to On-Demand Indexing. By clicking on the "Look and Feel" tab, you can choose between three primary layouts and six styles for your Google Site Search. Each style has a unique color scheme, text format, and search box appearance to fit in with the rest of your site.

If you love a style, but need to tweak it, you can customize it further by changing fonts, colors, backgrounds, promotion settings, as well as interactive features such as tabbing and mouse-overs. The preview function instantly shows you the effects of your changes, so you can keep iterating until your search results look just right.

What’s more, Google Site Search allows for further customization through a number of different features and capabilities such as the XML results feed, JSON, or our brand new custom data rendering features – tools that web developers with programming experience can use for more advanced results. With Themes, however, you can make major layout and formatting changes to your search experience right through your control panel, without having HTML, CSS, or JavaScript editing.

Google Site Search is constantly adding new features. We recently added mobile support for Custom and Site Search as well as support for rich snippets and easier synonym management, among many other enhancements made in 2009. Needless to say, we have ongoing new features and enhancements planned for 2010.

See how easy it is to put the power of Google search to work for your website.

Posted by Clay Maffett, Google Site Search team

Go Mobile with Google Site Search

As more and more people switch to smart phones as their primary entry point for browsing the web, businesses are looking for ways to help mobile visitors find the right information, fast.

That’s why the Google Site Search team has made it easy to enable users to search your website from devices like Android-powered phones, iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, and Palm Pre.

As a Google Site Search customer, you can repurpose your content to mobilize your web site. You can use the Site Search home page that we create for you as the preferred mobile entry point for your website. All the Google Site Search features - themes, result biasing, promotions, refinement labels, rich snippets, synonym enhancements, etc. – are available on the mobile version as well.

Additionally, if you customize Google Site Search on your website, those features will show up on your mobile home page. If you select or change the theme for your search engine, your mobile home page will automatically pick up those changes. Mobile results will also display thumbnails and actions if you have marked up your pages.

Learn more about these and other features at google.com/sitesearch.

Posted by Anna Bishop, Google Site Search team