Every blog or website should have a powerful search engine so that their visitors can easily search the site and get the relevant search results. Though, there are some inbuilt search engines with every blogging platform (WordPress, Joomla etc.) but they are not well enough compared with the Google site search. The inbuilt search engines short the search results out against your search term with date or other factors. That is why people want to integrate the Google site search feature into their blog or website as it is the best search engine entire the web.
Unfortunately, Google Site Search is not a free service. But don’t worry, you can still include Google Custom Search at your site which is free and works almost same as the Google site search.
Well, there are to ways to integrate Google custom search into a site or blog.
1. If you are an Adsense publisher, you can use ‘Adsense for search’ from your account and the implementation of the code is quite easy.
2. Those who do not have an Adsense account can still use the Google custom search at their website. All you need to have a valid Gmail address and visit this Google custom search page. After signing in, follow the step-by-step onscreen instructions out there and finally grab the code which you should place at your website templates or wherever you want to show the Google custom search bar for the visitors.
While the Adsense for search option is a complete search feature, the Google custom search option has some drawbacks. If you’ve tried the Google custom search for your blog, you should find that it shows the search results at the same page where you place that search bar. Which is not a good choice as it distracts your website or blog design.
Rather, you would like to keep a separate search result page and place the search bar at the header section of your blog theme so that the visitors can use the search feature from each page.
In this tutorial, we have written the complete and step-by-step guide to add Google custom search at your blog or website with a separate search result page.
1. Visit Google custom search page and click on the “Create a custom search engine”button. It will ask you to sign-in with a Gmail id. Just do that!
2. In the next page, give a suitable name for your search engine, write a description, specify the site URL in which you want to integrate the custom search engine, select the standard edition, agree with the terms of service and finally, click the “Next” button.
3. Complete all the three steps and you will get a code at the third step. You’ve just created your Google custom search engine and you can use that code any where at your webpages. But that code will show the search results at the same place where you place it, which is not our concern.
So, just ignore that code and click this link http://www.google.com/cse/manage/all which will take you into the page where you can manage your custom search engines.
4. Click on the “Control panel” link. Now, grab the unique id for your search engine from the control panel.
5. Login to your website dashboard or anything else that you can use to mange and edit your website templates. If you are using WordPress,
Go to Dashboard > Create a new page.
6. Paste the following code and publish that page.
Note: If you are an advanced WordPress user, you can create a suitable theme template for your search result page and use that template as an attribute for the published page. In this case, you will have to place the above code at that theme template.
7. You’re now one step away from your destination. Look at the following piece of code.
You will have to replace the action field with your site’s search result page address (the page URL) and the CX value with you search engine id which you created earlier(the red colored portions). Once you are done, paste the modified code at your theme template where you want to display the search bar.
