Manthan

Mark Lucovsky and Vik Singh have been fantastic and quick in responding to issues/request with the Google Custom/Ajax search. When released, the customs search had a limitation, whereby one couldn’t use the labels/refinements created on coop in AJAX search. It took them a few hours to roll this out

On Tuesday we announced our support for Custom Search Engines. We asked you for your input and many of you suggested that we add support for Custom Search Engine Refinements. This evening we launched support for Custom Search Engine Refinements in a way that complements what many of you are trying to build. We extended .setSiteRestriction() so that in addition to passing the Custom Search Engine Id, you can also pass a Custom Search Engine Refinement label. See the code snippet below:

var cseId = “017576662512468239146:omuauf_lfve”;
searcher = new GwebSearch();
searcher.setSiteRestriction(cseId, “Lectures”);

The problem I have seen with the custom search is, there is no way one can refine results from BlogSearch. Some of the features I would like to see

• The blogSearch control doesn’t support setSiteRestriction. So the search returns results from all over the blogosphere, with a lot of irrelevant info.
• The AJAX search doesn’t yet support code search. Sorely missed this while creating a custom search for Oracle Applications
• Next/Previous links on search custom search pages, without the need to going back to google home. Right now, you can only show 8 results on the page, but would really like to have navigation to all the results.
• Documentation, not very good and is tough to get started.

Well this is something that I could really use. Searching for Oracle Application related information mostly landed me in “spam websites”. So I ended up using site: parameter for narrowing down the search results. With the launch of “Custom Search Engine“, my job is made simple. There are only a few decent websites/forums which have usable information. But these forums/website have archaic search features. For example forums.oracle.com takes ages to load and brings a lot of irrelevant results. Using Google search for searching relevant information, while turning of the noise from splogs/spams would save me a lot of time. It took me five minutes to come up with my own Oracle Applications Search engine . Sweet.