I have played around with Googles Custom Search Engines earlier, but now I have finally used it in a live site and it turned out quite well. On MashupSpy.com I have set up a Custom Search engine that emphazises my favourite sites about mashups – in this I have included sites about Enterprise Mashups (gartner.com), sites with lots of usefull APIs (code.google.com), sites with great tutorials (developer.yahoo.com) and sites with great mashup insipirations (programmableweb.com). See the full list of sites on mashupspy.com.
Configuring the Search Engine in Googles control panel, adding sites etc is a walk in the park. Integrating a Custom Search Engine into the site was a bit tricky though, the documentation is far from perfect. The trick is to host the search results on your own site in an iframe (set in the Custom Search Engine control panel under “code”) and knowing that this iframe is generated by Google’s javascript when it is time to show the search result. For a while I was unsuccessfull in styling things since I tried to create my own iframe, but there is no need to complicate things like that. Also good to know is that running a Custom Search Engine locally works so-so, I got a lot of “The URI you submitted has disallowed characters.” error messages when running from localhost, but things worked perfectly once I uploaded it to the production server.
For the time it took (hours, mostly spent on learning the magics of CSS) it is an impressive functionality on MashupSpy, I will definitly use Custom Search Engines more in the future. If you have ideas on how I can improve MashupSpy or if I have missed any sites (see the full list on mashupspy.com) in my Custom Search Engine then please let me know!
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