Google developments
Jinfo Blog

27th October 2009

By Diana Nutting

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Following on from Udo Hohenfeld’s recent posting on Google Wave, and Joanna Ptomely’s note on side wiki, Google has now made a series of announcements about its Custom Search Engine (http://www.google.com/cse) service, and its Social Search feature. With the new Custom Search Wikipedia Skin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Csewiki), it is possible to use Google Custom Search to search across all Wikipedia articles for a given topic, as well as find relevant pages linked from the Wikipedia page that they are currently on. Wikipedia users can now log in to their accounts and edit their skin to include Google’s custom search feature. From then on, Wikipedia's search field will be replaced with Custom Search. Instead of just delivering Wikipedia pages matching queries, Custom Search will display three tabs when a user searches the site from a Wikipedia page. The first tab will display relevant Wikipedia results. The second page will display relevant wikis that are linked to the Wikipedia page the user is already on. The final tab displays related third-party sites that are linked to in a particular Wikipedia page. All results will be displayed inline on the same page the user is on. Google has also introduced new ways to customise how search results appear on users’ own websites. The new Custom Search Themes option in the Control Panel includes three layouts and six pre-designed themes, All six themes can be customised by changing fonts, colours, backgrounds, promotion settings, as well as interactive features such as tabbing and mouseovers, Users can also decide where the search box and results should be placed (in a contiguous layout or in two columns). There is also improved support for metadata in Custom Search results. Users who provide specific markup in their web pages, and use a new hosting option called Element, can include things like image thumbnails and specific “action” links in the search results that Google shows. You can now also do special metadata-based searches, such as looking for articles on your site from a certain author. At the same time Google's Social Search feature has gone live, providing users with publicly available web content pulled in from their social circle The tool is aimed at helping Google users to discover what it calls "publicly available web content from your social circle online". Google will suggest connections to those listed as friends on users' publicly available social network profile information and by crawling a user's Gmail email contacts. Once these details have been tracked for the first time, search results from social networks will always appear at the bottom of the search results page, along with an indication of which network the information had been pulled from. Users will be able to enable social search through the Google Labs section of the website, and they will need to be logged in to their Google Profile, an online reputation management tool. Social Search only works with social networks and websites where data is open and publicly available, so Google admitted that the tool would be unlikely to crawl sites such as Facebook, where the majority of information is hidden behind privacy settings.

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