What Is Google Programmable Search Engine?

Date First Published: 15th February 2023

Topic: Web Design & Development

Subtopic: Web Services

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty Level: 5/10

Learn more about what Google Programmable Search Engine is in this article.

Google Programmable Search Engine is a service provided by Google that allows website owners to include a custom search engine on their sites to help visitors find what they are looking for more quickly and efficiently. This customisable search engine uses Google's core search technology to provide fast and relevant results and it is easy to integrate the custom search engine on a website. This website is an example of a site that uses the Google Programmable Search Engine.

Features

Features of Google Programmable Search Engine include:

• Refinements, autocomplete, thumbnails, and promotions.
• Ability to customise the colours, borders, and general look and feel of the search engine box and results page to match the theme of a site.
• Ability to enable image search for a site.
• Ability to select a custom language. The language selection will have no effect on the actual results and will affect the local search results.
• Options to program the search engine to provide results from different sites. This could be a separate page, a whole domain name, specific parts of a website, or the whole web.
• Ability to add structured data to a site to customise search results.
• Ability to make money from the custom search engine by displaying ads at the top of the results page and linking it to a Google AdSense account. Website owners make money when someone clicks on one of the ads.
• Ability to link the custom search engine to Google Analytics to collect data about the behaviour of website visitors.

Pricing

Google Programmable Search Engine provides four main offerings. Two of them are available free of charge and the other two require payment. Below is a table of Google Programmable Search Engine offerings available for use.

Advantages and Disadvantages Of Google Programmable Search Engine

• It provides a better user experience as users do not have to leave a site to perform a search query.
• Its functionality and theme are fully customisable.
• Results are returned quickly after entering a search term, not leaving users waiting for a long time.

• Search results are not updated in realtime. This means that if website owners make changes to any pages on their websites, it may take a few days or weeks for the search engine to provide the updated results.
• Lack of control over what is indexed and when it will be indexed. The custom search engine returns results from Google's index and website owners cannot force Google's crawlers to index a page. As a result, the search results do not search the whole website.
• Lack of support. Even though there are good documentation resources on the internet to help implement Google Programmable Search Engine, there is not a support team to help website owners customise their search engine or make it live. This is unlike Google AdWords, where there is a support team to help people set up their ad campaigns.

History

In October 2006, Google announced on their blog that they were allowing people to create their custom search engines. It was originally named Google Custom Search, but was renamed to Google Programmable Search Engine in 2020.

In April 2022, monetisation was abruptly suspended, with the exception of users that were already running ads on at least one custom search engine. Publishers without existing monetised search engines were not able to monetise their search engines. Google said that it was "creating a new system for publishers seeking to monetise their search engines" and that "Ads will continue to show on these engines, but revenue sharing will not be available while we are preparing for the new system to be implemented. In the future, the new system of monetisation will be opened up to publishers on an invitation-only basis."

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