In all likelihood, you’ve seen where you perform a search on a website and the results look just very much like what you get when you do a search on Google. Well, in case you’re wondering how that works, Google has a product called Google Custom Search that lets you do just that. There are 2 versions, 1 free with ads, and a for-fee version that allows for more customization and much larger websites.

If you’re running a blog, that is based on Wordpress for example, then you can use the power of Google search on your site. While Google has decent documentation for how to do this generally, there don’t have specific docs on how to do this on a blog. Canadian blogger Maki who runs Dosh Dosh has put together a pretty thorough tutorial with screenshots that walks you through the process.

About the only thing we would emphasize some more in his tutorial is embedding the search box code in your site. This is the code that creates the search box and button.

You may also be interested in the Google Custom Search Wordpress plugin. It redirects all searches to GCS and automatically creates a new search results page in WP. Our advice is to take the time to learn about GCS and create everything yourself. It doesn’t take more than a few hours. The plugin is nice, but doesn’t allow for easy customization.

Popularity: 29% [?]