Search Philippines! A Google custom search engine

Interested in creating your own search engine? Try google custom search engine (CSE)! With google’s CSE, you can customized your search experience, including in the search only sites that are relevant to you. You can also host both the search box and search results in your site. You can even create custom search engine on the fly. (For example, creating a search engine for sites included in your blogroll.) For those interested, you can visit this webpage on CSE’s API.

It’s really easy to configure but you need to have a google account. If you already have one, follow the link above, login, and start building your own search engine. I already made one and called it Search Philippines! SP! can be found in this URL: http://search.philippinestoday.net/ This search engine only includes Philippine-related websites (well, that’s the target). For now, I have only a couple of websites included. I plan to include more Philippine news sites, pinoy blogs, etc.  Here is the image of the site.

What is this for users? Since the number of sites to search are limited and focused (say, only for Philippine news sites), users will be able to get more relevant search results as compared to using the entire google search engine. For website owners, this will give more visibility to your website. For instance, search the term ‘phpwebsite’ in google. This blog (myguide.bagarinao.com) appears in the 5th page. Search it again in my custom search engine Search Philippines! This blog is now on the first page.  This is because I included my blog in the list of websites for Search Philippines.

Any way, if you are interested in helping build Search Philippines! or want to include an SP! search box in your website or blog, drop me a note! It will be great to have our very own custom search engine.