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Google CSE

When Google came up with CSE (custom search engine), I knew this was a big thing. So, I promptly joined in the party. I started thinking about how I can use this cool tool.

First about the things that CSE can do-

* Place a search box and search results on your website.
* Specify or prioritize the sites you want to include in searches.
* Customize the look and feel to match your website.
* Invite your community to contribute to the search engine.

It’s the fourth feature that really got me going.

Every time I typed Kashmir in the Google search box, the top results were like this: info on Danish Rock band, news about 2005 earthquake, views of the whole world about Kashmir conflict, tourism site, government site, many useless sites and nothing about Kashmiri Pandits; no news about us. It actually bothered me. I wanted that when I type Kashmir, I should get results about my community.

It enables you to make your own CSE (custom search engine).Instead of searching the whole net, we just get to search a sub-set of the web specified by us and result is that we get totally query specific results. In my case, this sub-set is a bunch of good Kashmiri sites.
So, I set up a Search Engine just for Kashmir.

You can see it at work here at my other blog: Search Kashmir.

This makes it probably the first cyber Kashmiri Search Engine.
Right now, I have only linked the sites that I usually visit for my Kashmiri culture~history queries. However, the best think is that others can contribute. So, hopefully this would be a community affair.

Besides, this I have been a member of another community on Orkut. This community is for serious discussions of academic nature. Infact, it goes by the name Serous Academic Discussion. This community has lot of bright people from all over the world. And typical of bright people is, links to sites with bright content. So, I put up another search engine specifically for this community and named it Find Me Engine.

I have used the same Engine in this blog , as it has started to show really great results.

The most obvious use of CSE would be a search engine that searches only your blog or site, sort of an insite-searching tool. Earlier I had to use the services of some third party like technorati for this feature. Now, I just built a search engine for my own blog. Although, this feature is not working as good as it should but hopefully it would improve with time.

Read more about Google Custom Search

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