Google's Custom Search Engine Applied to Film Reviews and the Social Media Collective

By Dennis D. McDonald

A couple of days ago I received an email from Michael Cohn telling me he had used Google's Co-Op service to develop a custom Google search engine of independent film reviews. (A section of my blog is devoted to my occasional movie and DVD reviews.) Here is the link he supplied, which will take you to a page he calls "The Independent Film Reviewer Search Engine":

http://www.miconian.com/tools/indie_reviewers.html

I decided to try this myself, so I copied a list of links of the web sites of the members of the Social Media Collective to create this search engine; instead of creating a separate page I embedded the code here which Google supplies:

The hardest thing about the process was reading Google's Terms of Service, where you learn that when you use this service you agree not to post competing search engines on your site. The above search engine may therefore be short lived for this blog as I experiment with different things from time to time. Also, I checked the "no ads" box since, as far as I know, the Social Media Collective is not a commercial endeavor.

I can see the advantage of "custom" search engines like this -- being able to index a group of related web sites would be useful, although, this would tend to deprive the user of the value of a web-wide search in many instances.

What do you think?

Comments

[Michael Bennett Cohn]

Dennis, thanks for the link. About your concern that "this would tend to deprive the user of the value of a web-wide search in many instances." I wouldn't use the word "deprive," as the general search is still possible. But more importantly, Google Co-Op engines can be set up so that the selected sites in question are only the *preferred* source of results. In other words, if I had set up my search engine that way, the first 10 or 50 or 100 results would come only from indie film review websites, and the rest would come from whatever google had to offer in general.

But I didn't set it up that way, because my target audience here is people who want to make sure they're searching indie film reviews, not random sites that may happen to contain their search keywords, despite being unrelated to their actual concerns.

[Dennis McDonald]

Michael, thanks, that is a good point about the option to have the selected search hits show up first. People should know that there are a lot of ways to "tweak" the service. I'm really quite impressed with it.

How are you tracking action on or traffic via the searches? Google Analytics?

Dennis

[Michael Bennett Cohn]

I do use Google Analytics, but I also use the Google Co-Op Statistics data, which shows number of searches per day and also shows what the most popular searches are.

There are a lot of tweaks that can be done; some people have the search results showing up in funky iframes, with special fonts and text colors chosen to match the aesthetic of their site. I haven't gone down that road yet, but I hope to as I learn.