Last week Google’s Custom Search offering turned 3, and the company launched Custom Search for smartphones. Now Google has launched a couple of additional features for Custom Search, as well as a Custom Search Wikipedia skin.
When a Wikipedia user enables the Custom Search skin, he/she will be able to use Google Custom Search across all Wikipedia articles for a given topic and find relevant pages linked from the Wikipedia page that he/she is currently on. Search results will appear inline at the top of the Wikipedia page.
Results are organized into 3 tabbed groups: All Wikipedia pages, Linked Wikipedia pages, and Linked non-Wikipedia pages.
“Linked Custom Search enables the creation of dynamic search experiences, where the content being searched can be defined on the fly, and can change over time as new information becomes relevant,” explains Google. “The Custom Search skin creates a Linked Custom Search engine on demand for every Wikipedia page that you navigate to.”
More on that here.
Google has also now introduced “structured” custom search. If you use a Custom Search Element, you can now add publisher-provided links to your search results based on specific metadata markup in your web pages.
“These special structured data objects, such as Thumbnails and Actions, are generated from the PageMaps you provide,” Google says. “For example, Scribd, one of our partners, provides both Thumbnails and Actions in PageMaps on their pages, so we display both of these in our sample Custom Search engine, as shown below. The Actions in this case are ‘Download’ and ‘Fullscreen View’, but each publisher can provide customized actions, which they can also style via CSS.”
More on that here.
Finally, Google has launched Custom Search Themes. Users can choose from a number of different styles. They can also customize them further by changing fonts, colors, backgrounds, etc.
“You can also select from among a set of convenient layouts for full flexibility on the location of the search box and results – contiguous or in 2 columns – you decide!” says Google. “We’ve even added a compact layout (with only 4 results) that is useful for websites where space is at a premium and search results will not occupy the whole page.”
Learn more about Google’s Custom Search Themes here.
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