Hi, Does anyone use google custom search in their phpld directory? I have most of my pages indexed by google including the link page, but I tried to use google custom search, it can't search out the link page, such as www.nyname.com/detail/we-sell-products.html Does anyone got any ideas on how to make it work? Do I need to join their paid service such as google site search insteads?
This is an idea that I've played with for years. It would seem a perfect next step for directories - search the directory and do a full search using the sites in the directory. But, other than creating a secondary site, I have not seen a way to implement it well.
you need to have all the categories indexed and all the detail pages indexed, which is hard on phpLD because it gets indexed harder. I don't think it is a good idea. I will try to play with it to see what happens, even if this could be risky. what about the link submitted today and searched tomorrow ? If the page is not indexed, it won't show up in the results.
Hi hyper, Yes you are quite right, google site search only showed those pages which had been indexed. But if there are missing index pages, google offer new "on-demand" indexing feature where it allow new pages to be indexed within 24 hours in the individual database (NOT google global database unfortunately). However as for google custom search, there are completely different. I can only managed to search up to categories level, but not link page level. I am not sure what really differentiate between this two. I tried to test google site search, I managed to search my indexed pages but custom page....no luck.
Using Google Custom Search would not be dependent upon the directory category pages being indexed. One could add only accepted sites from a directory to the custom search engine (that's what makes it a custom search) and then present the results somewhere on their directory. For example, with my craft directory, someone looking for a very specific pattern could search the sites I list to see if anyone offers that pattern. They would only get Google results for the sites in my directory which would eliminate so very much of the junk presented in a regular search plus provide what would seem a much more valuable benefit to being listed in my directory. Part of what stopped me was the high amount of Google branding on the custom searches and the typical lack of clear verbiage on their instructions and TOS. However, it did seem like there were ways for people with more programming skills to get it to do more and incorporate it into existing sites more seamlessly.