Tuesday, May 06, 2008
If you’re a webmaster or site owner, you realize the importance of providing high quality search
on your site so that users easily find the right information.
We
just announced
today that
AdSense for Search
is now powered by Custom Search.
Custom Search
(a Google-powered search box that you can install on your website in minutes) helps your users
quickly find what they’re looking for. As a webmaster, Custom Search gives you advanced
customization options to improve the accuracy of your site’s search results. You can also choose
to monetize your traffic with ads tuned to the topic of your site. If you don’t want ads, you
can use
Custom Search Business Edition.
Now, we’re also looking to index more of your site’s content for inclusion in your Custom Search
Engine (CSE) used for search on your site. We figure out what sites and URLs are included in
your CSE, and—if you’ve provided
Sitemaps
for the relevant sites—we use that information to create a
more comprehensive experience for your site’s visitors. You don’t have to do anything specific,
besides submitting a Sitemap (via
Webmaster Tools)
for your site if you haven’t already done so. Note that this change will not result in more pages
indexed on Google.com and your search rankings on Google.com won’t change. However, you will be
able to get much better results coverage in your CSE.
Custom Search is built on top of the Google index. This means that all pages that are available on
Google.com are also available to your search engine. We’re now maintaining a CSE-specific index
in addition to the Google.com index for enhancing the performance of search on your site. If you
submit a Sitemap, it’s likely that we will crawl those pages and include them in the additional
index we build.
In order for us to index these additional pages, our crawlers must be able to crawl them. Your
Sitemap will also help us identify the URLs that are important. Please ensure you are not
blocking us from crawling
any pages you want indexed. Improved index coverage is not instantaneous, as it takes some time
for the pages to be crawled and indexed.
So what are you waiting for?
Submit your Sitemap!
How we apply this
Google announcements age. We keep this post here for the record, and we note for clients whether the behaviour it describes still applies today or has since been superseded.
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