Introduction

Welcome to the Google Custom Search Developer's Guide! It is intended for anyone who wants to create a search engine for a website or a collection of interesting websites.

The guide starts out by walking you through the process of creating a custom search engine using the wizard. Later, it shows you how to further customize and add whizzbang to your search engine using Custom Search XML or TSV files. Don't be daunted if you are not sure what XML or TSV files are; the developer's guide will show you what you need to know to implement the more advanced features.

If you want see live examples of custom search engines, view the Custom Search Directory.

Table of Contents

The documentation set includes the following pages:

1. Developer's Guide
   1. Getting Started ^Updated!
   2. The Basics
   3. Defining Your Search Engine Specifications
   4. Selecting Sites to Search
   5. Changing the Ranking of Your Search Results
   6. Helping Your Users Refine Their Searches
   7. Improving User Queries for More Relevant Results
   8. Creating Special Results
   9. Designing the Look and Feel ^New!
   10. Making Money
2. Programmer's Guide
   1. Programmatically Creating Custom Search Engines
   2. Customizing Your Result Snippets ^New!
4. Reference
   1. Glossary
   2. Search Labels
   3. Language Values
   4. Encoding Values

Search the Custom Search Documentation

If you want to search across official Google documentation on Custom Search, use the following gadget. You can even add it to your iGoogle page.

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