Google has just unveiled the Google Co-op Custom Search Engine. Well, Custom Search Engine allows you to:
Create a highly specialized Custom Search Engine that reflects your knowledge and interests. Place it on your website and, using our AdSense for Search program, make money from the resulting traffic.
With Google Custom Search Engine, you can restrict sites that appear in your search results or simply give your chosen sites a higher search rank or priority. You can even later add sites for inclusion using Google Marker. Google will give you a piece of code for a search box for you to embed in your site or blog. You can also customize the presentation and functionality of the search engine. Also, you can invite others to co-edit your search engine using the collaboration feature.
Google Custom Search Engine vs Google Search
Here’s an example of a Google Custom Search Engine result page when searching Mac games on Macworld:
The screenshot below is from Google Search:
As you can see from the Custom Search Engine result, I could venture a guess that Macworld has tuned the search results such that pages from macworld.com and macosxhints.com were given higher search result priority.
Hmmm…does that ring a bell? If you operate a group of other related sites, you could possibly have your sites displayed at the top of the search results, therefore creating a higher chance of driving outbound traffic to your own sites.
Making Money with AdSense
Google also wants you to make money from your Custom Search Engine so that they can make money too 
. Via Google’s AdSense program, Google will place contextually relevant ads in the search results and pays you a share of the revenues generated by those ads.
If you already have an AdSense account, you need to fill out a form providing your AdSense email address, zip code, and the last 5 digits of your phone number. Google will use this information to connect to your AdSense account and allowing you to make money right away.
If you don’t have an AdSense account yet, you will need to fill out a form provided in the Google co-op control panel and follow the instructions to activate your new account.
Resources:
- Google Co-op Custom Search Engine: http://www.google.com/coop/cse
- Custom Search Engine FAQ: http://www.google.com/coop/docs/cse/faq.html
- Featured examples: http://www.google.com/coop/cse/examples/
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I think one of the good things about the custom search engines is the fact you can use integrate them so completely into your own site with just a little bit of javascript I have a simpler example on our blog then on the Google web site for integration using the AJAX search API.
http://ventureskills.wordpress.com/2006/10/26/google-custom-search-engine/
cheers
Tim
Venture Skills
Tim, thanks for showcasing your AJAX-based custom search example.
Hee no problem the example in the post is a really simple one as opposed to the one on the Google site which is well them showing off, I think its worth the time to integrate custom search engines into your own site, combined with search maps a custom search engine can easily replace a site search, add in making money by included trusted sites and ad sense and your on to a winning combination.