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>> MUKHERJEE: Thanks, Paul. It's such a nice welcome. It's actually very special to be
in Bangalore because actually I went to school in Bangalore. I was a student at St. Joseph's
and Bishop Cotton's many, many years back. It's amazing to see what's happened to all
Madras' roads. It's just amazing. And, so, I'm a Bengali, but I brought up in Bangalore,
so that makes me a "Bangbong," so a [INDISTINCT] in all of this. But it's really, really nice
to be back home. Before I get started, I want to actually thank the local team here, Alok,
Paul, you know, all the folks who put this together. They spent a lot of time to actually
make this a very successful conference. And so I'd like to take the opportunity and thank
them. So let's give them a big hand. All right, so I'm going to talk about Google Custom Search.
But before we get started, I just want to get a feel for, you know, how many of you
have actually heard of Custom Search. So, show of hands. Okay, very good, so that's
nice. So, hopefully, today, after my presentation you will learn more about some of the details
that you probably are not already aware of. And please feel free to stop me at any given
point in time during the presentation, make it interactive, and we can go from there.
So what is Google Custom Search? Google Custom Search basically offers you the ability to
take the Google platform in your hands, and we'll talk about that. So Google Custom Search
allows anybody--you, publishers, bloggers, websites, organizations, businesses--to basically
leverage the Google search platform that we've created. It's a very highly scalable, very
high precision system that we've created. And you can then create a very customized
search experience on your own website targeting your audience, targeting your content, your
topics, your topics of interest, your expertise. So the way I think of it, I kind of like to
draw this analogy with pizza. So I see now there's lots of nice pizza places here. And,
in fact, some of the, you know, some of my friends told me to actually try out this murg
malai tikka masala. That was pretty good, actually. It's great. It's fantastic. So you
know all these flavors that have come out here, it's just amazing. But think of the
whole pizza as being google.com, all right? So when you're actually searching across the
Internet, that's really what google.com offers you. What Custom Search offers you is a little
different. In the U.S., there's a--it's very common for people to actually take pizza by
the slice. So you walk into the mall and then you actually--you might be in the mood for
a little bit of, you know, chicken and maybe a little bit of Hawaiian pizza, so actually
you buy two slices. So, Custom Search is like that. You take the slices of pizza that you
want and you offer that to your consumers, all right? So, take that to your website.
These are the slices of pizza you care about, and you put the toppings you like. And you
customize it even further, right? You want it really hot. You can, you know, add some
more peppers and jalapeños, and you basically then customize that for your dinner, right?
So Custom Search is like that. So, it's built on top of Google Search so you get all the
benefits of Google Search--the great ranking, the great relevance, the scalability, the
uptime, the latency, the speed. Fantastic. And on top of that, you then customize it
a little bit further. You create your slice of the index, if you will, and you can boost
ranking. You can say, "Okay, I want these sites to actually rank a little higher because
these are my sites," or "These are important on my site." And you can also customize the
presentation. So we have controls, overall look and feel of the colors and the way your
site looks. And because you're embedding the search experience into your own website, we
give you those controls, and that allows you to embed the search experience for your customers
on your website. So that is the analogy that I'd like you to take back. You know what you
want. You know what your users want. Custom Search offers you this great platform, allows
you to customize it further and offer it to your customers. So, again, just to reiterate,
in terms of getting information, all you need to remember is www.google.co.in/cse. CSE,
standing for Custom Search Engine. I often refer to that acronym. So, if I say CSE, that's
what I'm talking about. But the value proposition actually extends both for you, you as an individual
or an organization, as well as your community, which is the searcher. So on the left-hand
side, you basically have your--you, the webmaster, or you, the organization. So you harness the
power of Custom Search. You create an experience for your users. You search enable your website.
You invite your friends, members of the community to contribute. So that's another feature,
which is that you can actually have a collaborative model where multiple people in your organization
or in your community can actually contribute and make your search experience better over
time. And very important also to the success of the product and to the customers is that
you can make money from the resulting traffic, so you can monetize that search traffic on
your website. We have--Custom Search has been an extremely successful product over the last
couple of years. We have over a million registered custom search engines. So if you don't have
a custom search engine on your site and if, or if you haven't played with it, I strongly
recommend that you at least get familiar with the product. It's very easy to use, and then
you can create a search experience in minutes, literally minutes. On the searcher side of
things, this is your community, the users that are coming to your website, they find
information easily at the source. For them, the search is contextual. They are at your
site. They are looking for a specific amount of information or a specific topic of information.
Your site offers that, so the search is contextual around that topic. And I'll talk a little
bit more in-depth about context and why that's important. And, of course, as I said, as part
of the community, they can also contribute back to the engine if you have enabled that.
So at a high level, let me talk about why you need to look at using Google Custom Search.
Why use Google Custom Search? A very important point, in fact, a couple of the examples that
Adam used during his clinic, I noticed that they have a little structured search, but
they don't have a generic search or, you know, an open free text search option on their website.
And I have seen this across a lot of websites even in India where you don't have a search
box on the front page. The reason that's really becoming important, these people are getting
used to using search as a way to navigate. The moment you have more than 10, 15, 20,
30 pages, and of course if you have thousands of pages, search is mandatory. But even if
you have a reasonably small site, search is becoming a very common way for people to find
information. You know, the web is moving so fast, people have very little time on their
hands. They want to be able to find information very, very quickly. So, they're always looking
for the search box. I mean, when I go to a site, if I don't see something that I'm looking
for on the, you know, in the first couple of, you know, a few seconds, I'm looking for
the search box. So, because of the popularity of search engines, people have gotten used
to looking at search as a way to navigate. So if you have a website, in addition to navigation,
you want to have the people have the ability to search across your website. Search can
be, as I said, integrated in minutes, literally minutes, using the look and feel of your own
site. Better user retention of your targeted search. We have seen cases where customers
have actually adopted Custom Search over some proprietary software and overnight they have
seen large increases in the number of searches. And when I say a number of searches, number
of successful searches, you're also talking about people staying on your site longer,
finding the information and accessing the content on your site longer. So if I'm monetizing
your content using AdSense for content, that's also going to be benefited by a high quality
search. And user retention is very important. The other important value proposition that
Custom Search offers out of the box is relevance. A lot of people have said, "We've spent months
tuning up proprietary search engine for quality and relevance, but the moment we turned on
Custom Search, we've seen fantastic quality of results out of the box." The reason for
that is very clear. We sit on top of the Google index, and Google takes into account all the
great ranking, page rank, anchor text, et cetera, on the web, so even though you're
searching only a small domain of websites, the relevance that we are computing is built
on top of the Google algorithms. So, out of the box, even without any tuning at all or
even without boosting or using some of the advance features of Custom Search, you get
really high quality relevance. And lots of organizations try it and immediately say,
"Wow, this is so much better than what we have already, you know, spent six months developing."
So you have to really give it a shot and look to see how it works for your site. Better
click to rates and conversations on your site. I will talk a little bit about some of the
interesting experiments around ad click rates and [INDISTINCT] as well for some of these
cases that we've seen. There are some significant increases that you can actually drive through
certain features in Custom Search. Enhanced Indexing. There were a couple questions where
you, you know, we talked about, "My site has so many pages, but only a small subset of
those pages has been indexed by Google." Now, we understand that that could be a problem
for certain sites. But when you are doing the site search on your own site or you are
trying to carve out a specific section of the index for searching, we know that you
need to go deeper, because when you have your own pages and you are providing search on
your own site, you absolutely you want to search all those pages. So to address that
specific need, Custom Search actually has Enhanced Indexing. So we actually have a separate
Custom Search Index for our CSEs and we also in the--at the end of last year, created a
new feature that we refer to as On-Demand Indexing, because we understand that when
you're launching a new product, you want people to be able to find that on your own site search.
So, you have the ability to On-Demand Indexing to actually give us a portion of your site,
of your URLs and we will actually index it into your custom search engine in--within
24 hours. So that's a very powerful feature. And we have had fantastic feedback once we
launched this because people really found that, you know, they wanted that kind of control
over their own site search. Features, several features are available that you may or may
not be aware of. We have features like Labels, and I'll talk about that; Synonyms, you have
the ability to actually add synonyms for your domain specific sites. You know, this is very
important because synonyms on a worldwide basis may actually not apply or maybe--you
may actually have very specific synonyms on top of what, you know, people normally use
for acronyms for your specific business or industry or specific, you know, terms that
you use in your--on your website. Date-Biasing, we actually have the ability for you to actually
control the ordering of results by date in addition to the other Custom Search, you know,
boosts that we have provided. And you have the ability to promote specific results. So,
for example, if you're a travel site--I've heard of, you know, some questions about travel
sites--you might actually want to promote specific things right on top for specific
queries, right? So this, we have the ability for you using KeyMatches to actually promote
specific things for a specific queries. And this may not even be URLs. This may just be
information that you might want to provide. As I said, you can monetize with relevant
ads. And when I say relevant ads, we've actually added some features by which you can actually
add keywords to your search engine. So, for example, if it's a travel site or a travel
search engine, you can actually add travel-specific keywords, travel flights, hotel, et cetera.
And those might actually help you tune your ads to the topic of your search engine. We
have advanced APIs, customization, various branding options. I had a question today at
lunch. Somebody was asking me, you know, "How can I adopt Custom Search but actually have
control over the branding because it's my company and I want actually have control of
the branding?" We actually have offerings around the Custom Search platform which gives
you control of the branding and further customization. You can actually get your results in XML format.
You can do much more presentation control over that, and we have tech support as well
with the site search. The Google site search product is effectively built on top of the
Custom Search platform. And, very important, last but not the least, it's integrated with
the Google platform. As I said, the relevance, the goodness of, you know, search quality
that we heard about this morning actually comes, too, right away in Custom Search. So,
it's integrated with Google Search on top of the Google platform, but also with Webmaster
Tools and Sitemaps. So when I talk about Enhanced Indexing or the On-Demand Index, the Sitemaps
is the mechanism that we basically use to get the information in as to what URLs do
you think are high priority, what URLs do you want to index in the next 24 hours for
On-Demand Indexing. The same sitemap mechanism is offered to you. And you just do this once.
You go to Webmaster Tools, you submit the sitemap, and you indicate to us which sitemap
you would want to use for On-Demand Indexing. You don't have to do additional work and submit
anything specific for Custom Search. Okay. So I want to spend a little bit of time around
context because I want you to think about what context makes sense for when you're trying
to create a website or a search experience. So I think of this as kind of going from a
small sphere of influence to a much larger sphere of influence, so, you, your community,
and your world. So what else? Like, I have a blog, I have my--but I--when I think about
my personal world, I think of, you know, my blog, my bookmarks, my search history, my
friends, their sites that they're interested in, and potentially some searches also that
I might have bookmarked, et cetera. So that's basically my world and I can create a search
experience around this that actually features in Custom Search specifically a feature called
Linked Custom Search Engines which allow me to actually dynamically create a search engine
that changes over time. So I talk about that when I talk about the Blogger Widget. But,
basically, you can actually create a search engine around the bunch of links that actually
can change over time, and the system can actually update it for you automatically. So that's
one sphere of influence. If you go to the next step, you're talking about enhancing
or expanding that sphere of influence. So what are the topics of interest? So, for example,
I'm a big soccer fan--a football fan, and so I like to, you know, find out information
about what's happening across the world of football. So I actually have created a little
search engine that, you know, searches across a bunch of, you know, high quality football
sites. And so that's kind of my topic of interest, if you will. It's a little beyond me, but,
you know, I can actually share it with friends who actually are also interested in football.
Communities can create these kinds of search engine experiences. There are lots of communities
that have actually done this. And I've talked about one of them, which is very powerful,
which is the Adobe Help Community. Groups, when you have different groups of people,
you know, they can collect information. A very good example of this was actually during
the earthquake in China. A bunch of Googlers actually got together over two days, and they
spent a lot of time to put together a bunch of sites and created a search engine around
them to be able to find lots, you know, they have lots of bulletin boards, et cetera, that
were coming up, but people were just looking for information about their, you know, their
family and friends. And they just put together search across these sites. And even if that
helped a few people over those, you know, over the next week, I think they had, you
know, hundreds of thousands of hits on that search engine, and maybe that resulted in
a few people finding, you know, more information about their families. I think that was an
outstanding effort in terms of communities and groups. And, of course, as you deliver
your products and services to customers, they are your communities. So, as a business, as
an organization, as a government, you actually have a much larger community that you're catering
to. In fact, there are several government sites that I've seen in India which have a
lot of content and no search box. It's just mind-blowing that we don't have search boxes
on some of these very heavy content sites. And, of course, your have business, you want
to actually be able to offer your services and have people find them. That's your community.
And then you go to the next kind of set, which is your world of information, right? This
can be, you know, based on country, for example, you know, a bunch of Bollywood sites that,
you know, are relevant to, you know, a much larger community in the country or by language.
You can actually go across countries, but by language. So, for example, Spanish is spoken
in several countries, but you can actually have Spanish-related custom search engines
that actually span geographical boundaries. What I'm trying to make here is that you should
think about what your services are, who your communities are, and what kind of search experience
you want to create. It does not have to be restricted to the specific site that you are,
that you managed or that you are on. So, for example, you might have sister sites. You
might have partner sites. You might have, you know, a conglomerate that actually has
multiple brands. So you can actually very easily crate a very comprehensive search experience
once you know the communities that you're catering to. So just to drive home the fact,
here are some examples. So where I'm claiming that, you know, Custom Search gives you the
tools necessary to create a very contextual search. So, during the Beijing Olympics, these
are slightly dated screenshots, but they make a point. So, if you did a search for "Bolt"--this
was around the time of the Olympics--there was exactly one result. I think the last one
here on Usain Bolt, who was obviously, you know, huge at the Olympic Games, but that's
what I would call a generic search result. Now, this is not irrelevant because at that
point in time people who are looking on google.com, you know, this is their--over time based on,
you know, what people are looking for, the feedback and the log analysis, et cetera,
et cetera, page rank, et cetera. Those are really the relevant results that the algorithms
have determined. But if you look at somebody who is coming to the Olympic site, right?
They are really looking, they are already directing their context, right? You know,
that they are at the Olympic site and they are looking for a specific set of information.
So what Google did at that point in time was they also had a landing page for the Olympic
Games. And on that landing page, we have created a custom search engine. And on that search
engine, if you did the same search for "Bolt," you can see very easily that, you know, it
basically filters right into the topic of interest, which is all about Usain Bolt. A
similar example was during the elections, just prior to the elections. If you did a
search on google.com for nuclear power, you get a very high quality search results of,
you know, general information about nuclear power. But, again, Google had a landing page
for the elections, and when you did a search for nuclear power on that specific landing
page, you actually got some very interesting editorialized kind of content about the policies
of, you know, across the different candidates around nuclear power--so, what was Obama thinking
about nuclear power, what was McCain thinking about nuclear power. So, that gives you a
much quicker answer because you know you're on a specific topic of interest and that's
the context. Now, what they have also done is they added this--these are the Labels that
I was talking about. So, very simply, you can actually annotate the specific, you know,
websites or patterns. Actually, Custom Search uses patterns. You can actually identify specific
labels with these patterns so then you can then drill down. So, for example, if I'm interested
in, you know, what's happening at the conventions around nuclear power, are there any rallies
being held, you can just drill down into that specific label and restrict your search by
that link. So that's another interesting feature that you might want to think about because
if you organize or categorize your content, you might be able to provide that categorization
information to your users. Oops, that wasn't me. So that's actually what context means
for you. So, a few examples of Custom Search in India, whenever I come to India I love
to catch up on the latest, you know, in terms of Bollywood as well as sometimes, you know,
try to see how the Cricket Team is doing, because whenever I watch they lose. It's kind
of amazing. Of course, I did watch the two Pathan Brothers do that wonderful innings
a couple of weeks back. But here's a search engine which actually gives you information
about guitar chords. They've actually conglomerated across a bunch of music sites, so if you search
for, you know, information on specific songs, you get lyrics and information as well as
chords information around specific songs. Here's another site that one of my colleagues
alerted me to. This is an opening site in India. And here, again, you can get great
reviews around the latest movies. And, so, I was actually interested in this movie, Delhi
6. I'm not sure what the cool way of saying it is. But, unfortunately, I didn't have the
time to actually catch the movie, but I'll do it back home. And Cricbuzz, which is one
of the cricket sites in India, also provides and actually uses the Labels as well that
I talked about, you know, a bunch of cricket sites information around cricket. So this
should give you an idea of some of the things you can do. But think about what you are trying
to offer to your users and where Custom Search could play a role. Okay. So now, I'm just
going to kind of step in to more of the product. Custom Search, I keep referring to the Custom
Search Platform and that's--the reason is that it really is a platform. We've actually
delivered Custom Search in various ways to customers, and I'll talk about some of these
various spokes. And as I do that, instead of talking about specific product features,
I try to highlight some of the features of the product or how you can do things with
the Custom Search Administration Console and show you in the context of these specific
implementations. So the platform, as I said, is offered in various ways. So think of, you
know, it being available to users, individuals, webmasters, bloggers; a lot of bloggers are
actually, you know, adopted Custom Search. And you have universities, non-profits, governments.
Actually, some pretty large governments actually have adopted--when I say large governments,
state governments in the U.S. are also pretty large entities. Many of them have actually
adopted Custom Search and there'll be some announcements on that as well including some
national government organizations. Then we have this category of syndication partners.
These are the large publishers and large publishing houses, which actually, you know, send a lot
of traffic to Custom Search, but they actually want more customization, more presentation
controls, and they typically get the results in XML format and these are the people who
also typically monetized their traffic very heavily. So they are really AdSense partners
if you will. So that's a category of, you know, for example About.com, IDG, New York
Times, they actually use Custom Search as well. And businesses and governments, most
of these entities typically don't want to show ads. They want to have more banning controls
and they typically go into the Google site search product offering. And, so for example,
the UK Parliament, NASA, eHealthInsurance, which is an insurance company in the U.S.,
basically use site search product and, as I said, they have much more controls and also
get tech support. New class of applications, search-enabled applications, for those of
you who are not aware and I'll talk a little bit more about this, but Adobe has actually
adopted Custom Search in a very, very innovative fashion and I'll talk about that. I have some
screenshots as well. And then, eventually application developers; a lot of our developers
actually do very innovative things with Custom Search. So if you look at companies like Topicle
and Lijit, they actually offer again, you know, take advantage of some of the cutting
edge features of Custom Search like Dynamic Search Engines, which, you know, creating
basically a sphere of influence around you and creating a search engine around you for
your friend, you know, using your friend's links, your blogs, your Facebook accounts,
et cetera. They've done some very interesting things around Custom Search. So what I'm going
to do now is I'm going to go back to these examples and I'm going to show and highlight.
I'm not going to go through an exhaustive list of features. You can go to the website
and you know, you know, get familiar with it and get a lot of information there. But
let me just highlight a few things that might be of interest. So here's my personal blog
and the point I wanted to make here is that, you don't have to write a line of code to
actually get a customized search experience on your blog. So specifically what happens
is we have a blogger widget that you can configure with a couple of clicks. And what that offers
is a specific gadget--oops, if you're going to click the...
>> [INDISTINCT] >> MUKHERJEE: The stop button in the bottom.
Sorry about that guys. Okay, so...Okay. No, there's something wrong with it. In line using
the AJAX Search API and you can just, you know, cross them out if you don't want to
search results and continue reading the blog. Now, the point of this is that, it's again,
very, very easy to configure this. So this is the search box widget that is available
for bloggers to use on blog on Blogger.com, and it's very easy. There is no code to be
written. It's just, you know, click two clicks and you're off and running. This, again just
to reiterate, this uses a very advance feature of Custom Search which is linked Custom Search
Engines. What--why is it--the advantage is that, you're not just searching your blog
post but you're actually automatically searching the Custom Search actually extracts all the
links that you've created--Universities, the Colorado State University is an example of
a university that adopted this. And what I wanted to point out here is the customized
look and feel. If you have certain brand colors on your site, you can very easily in minutes
offer the search results in the specific, you know, colors of your site. And the way
you do this is a very [INDISTINCT] kind of editor. You just select, you know, the specific
colors and you see the changes right away, and you preview and you're done. It just takes
seconds to do this. Again, information on Custom Search in general, google.com/cse,
you'll get all the information about the features as well as pointers to various resources.
And the resource site that these--that these folks have put up for the search--what is
the site search, India SearchMasters? >> India SearchMasters.com.
>> MUKHERJEE: IndiaSearchMasters.com actually has a resources site page, which has a bunch
of links that you can also look at. So in terms of Syndication Partners, many of these
partners actually, as I said, monetize, so I wanted to focus on a couple of things here.
So here you have, of course, IDG owns Macworld, which is a very, very powerful brand around
Mac and Apple products. And obviously they use ads and I wanted to talk about ads and
keywords, but also labels. So they've used effectively their--very, very effectively
they have used labels. So they've created, for example, you know, various views on what's
popular. So iPhone and iPod for example are very popular categories, so they've created
those categories on the--at the top level. But also otherwise, you know, reviews and
blogs, et cetera. So they can actually direct users to what they are looking for. So in
terms of ads, to actually configure ad--if you have--already have an AdSense account,
configuring that AdSense account into a custom search engine is trivial. You just go into
the Make Money Tab and you just associate your AdSense account with your custom search
engine, and from that point in time, you know, your searches are monetized and you get a
rev-share with Google on these clicks, on these ad clicks. In terms of refinements,
again, it's a very simple interface. You create a refinement, you define the patterns that
map to that refinement, and you can manage these refinements. Now for those of you who
are interested in more details on ads and AdSense for search, you can go to Google.com/--and
by the way, you can go to google.co.in, as well. For--it's an equivalent URL, /adsense/afs.
AFS, standing for AdSense For Search, as opposed to AdSense For Content, which is typically
content ads. Businesses, Governments typically use custom--I mean, use Google Site Search.
And one feature that I wanted to point out here and this is eHealthInsurance, which is
a Site Search customer, but one of the features that they have adopted is--oh well, let me
talk about a few of them. So, as I said, branding is optional with the site search product,
so if they wanted to drop the Google Custom Search Branding or the Google Branding, they
are able to do so. And they typically license the product and there's a whole bunch of pricing
options that I can talk about. Ads optional, so they can actually drop ads because they
don't want users potentially to leave their site, they want to stay, you know, keep them
on their site. KeyMatches, KeyMatches is what I was talking about when I said promotions.
So specifically when you're looking for things like a long-term insurance or health insurance,
they might want to promote specific products right to the top of the search results and
that's what we refer to as KeyMatches. And with site search, you actually get the results
back in XML format, so then you'll have more control over how you might want to actually
deliver the results. And in fact, NOL that was also referred to by Adam, NOL also uses
Custom Search and you can see that their results are very, very highly customized, and they
provide a lot of metadata and mappings on the rendering site. And again, creating these
KeyMatches is pretty trivial. It's, again, a very, very simple editor. You basically
define the keywords that you want to trigger on. And I'm trying very hard not to hit the
red button. And you have the title that you want to provide and specifically the lines
of text or the summary, or snippet that you want to provide, as well as an optional URL.
So, as I said, it doesn't even have to actually be a page that you drive people to, although
that's typically, you know, what we recommend. Now for information on pricing options and
what site search offers you in terms of, you know, the XML results format, et cetera, the
Ads Optional Branding options, et cetera, you can go to google.com/sitesearch. That
should be pretty easy. Applications. And as I said, Adobe has done some very interesting
things and I'll talk about that. So, go back a bit. Okay. So, what Adobe did was--how many
of you here are familiar with Adobe applications, developers? Okay. So, that's quite a few of
you. So, Adobe as you might know actually has very powerful graphics tools and authoring
tools, but also they have a fantastic community of developers. So, a lot of Adobe sites, developer
sites actually have very rich content in terms of designs, in terms of tips, cheap cheats,
tricks, templates, et cetera. So what Adobe did was that they created this Adobe Community
Help site. And what they did there was they actually took, you know, thousands of their
top developer sites and they actually created a search experience around these developer
sites. So in addition to the Adobe.com content, they actually also, you know, offer you all
these developer content and--through this community help feature. What they then did
was really exciting, was that they took this--they took the search experience and they actually
embedded this in the Adobe applications in Creative Suite 4. So those are few who actually
upgraded to Creative Suite 4 will actually see these--I don't know if this is--is visible
on the screen, but on the right hand side you see these embedded search boxes. And when
you search within the application itself, you are actually taken to this very customized,
very developer rich, you know, you might find your tip that you're looking for right there,
type of experience. This is what I mean by contextual. This is very, very contextual
within the application. They know you are in an Adobe application. They know you are
in Flash. So they know what you are looking for and they give you very, very targeted
information around this community help search. And they've done this with the Dreamweaver
and all the applications in Creative Suite 4. So this is Illustrator. So if you have
a publishing platform or an authoring content management platform that you work with, then
this is a great, you know, vehicle for you to provide your communities and your users
an embedded search experience that makes sense for them. The AJAX API is actually a very
powerful API and showed you an instance of that on the blogger widget, which is the inline
experience. But the AJAX Search API actually gives you a lot of customization. If you really
want to create a very customized search presentation model around the search results, then the
AJAX API is something that you might want to look at. And the AJAX API allows you to
basically create a very, very highly configurable look and feel around the results and also
a very, very Web 2.O-centric kind of experience around search. So, as an example, this is
Lijit, which is a kind of blogger, a kind of application as well around Custom Search.
But they use the AJAX Search--the AJAX Search API to create this kind of tabbed look and
feel. So, you can actually click on the tabs or the refinements on the labels, so you can
actually create a tab per label. And then, you can actually drill down. Your drill down
is immediately reflected by a click on the tab. And so they offer JSON APIs and JavaScript
objects, and you can also monetize using ads. So, if you are looking for a very highly configurable
presentation model with, you know, a lot of interactivity and the AJAX API offers this.
And AJAX API has already got Custom Search built into it. All you need to provide is
the ID of the search engine that you are trying to access. So I'm sorry I'm throwing a lot
of stuff at you, but what I'm trying to kind of get across is that there are lots of options
and lots of offerings. And you might need to figure out what is right for your organization.
In terms of APIs, everything--all the information on APIs is available on code.google.com and
there's APIs for AJAX Search as well as for Custom Search. Now, developers actually, as
I said, have done very interesting things with custom search. And I want to talk a little
bit about the community aspect of Custom Search, because this is something that, for example,
if you have a Bollywood type site, you might actually want to bring people in and discuss
and, you know, create a community where people are contributing, you know, information around
the sites. So this is specifically a company, I believe it's in Germany, that offers their
users the ability to create, you know, Topical Search Engines. And so, you can see the whole
bunch of search engines have been created and the search engines themselves are being
rated. So now the search engine has become an entity on their site. And so that's one
aspect of the community. But there's also another aspect of community that I wanted
to focus on, which is that built into Custom Search into the platform itself is the ability
for collaboration. So, by definition, you as an organization can get, you know, multiple
people in your organization to contribute to the search engine. So, for example, if
you have a business and you have multiple departments, you can have, you know, a few
people from each department actually create and update their search engine for their department.
So that's a feature that you might want to think about exploiting. So very quickly to
recap what I've just told you. This is more of a--sort of a platform, sort of a figure--I
don't want to confuse you. It's not very technical, but the point I want to make here without
pointing with the red button is, you have the Google Custom Search platform, which is
built on top of the Google index, which is on the left hand side. In addition, we have
the Custom Search Index, which gives you deeper and enhanced coverage and also the On-Demand
Index, which gives you more control over how frequently, you know, specific assets are
crawled by the Custom Search sort of indexing pipeline. On top, you have these various offerings,
you have site search for business, you have AdSense for monetization, and you have the
AJAX API and the CSE APIs, which give you more control of a presentation. On the right
hand side, you have the integration with Webmaster Tools. So specifically, Sitemap, which we've
heard about the XML Sitemaps, is something that I strongly encourage you all to look
at. Not just from a point of view of getting, you know, google.com to understand more about
your content, but also as you develop custom search engines, this is the mechanism that
we recommend by which you get information into the custom search engines, indicate to
us what's important, what should be crawled right away, and we have some controls that
we offer you to make that possible. So, Sitemaps come into Webmaster Tools, no difference,
no change in what you do normally, and you just indicate to Custom Search, you know,
what specific Sitemaps you want us to look at for On-Demand Indexing. And things should
work, you know, hopefully, as designed and things would be up and running on your website
search within a matter of 24 hours. So, again, just too quickly reiterate what I just talked
about, we have site search, which is typically targeting businesses where ads are optional,
branding is optional, you have XML result sets, and you have technical support. You
have--for people who want to monetize their search, you're really talking about the AdSence/AFS
product, basically the AdSence product. We have, typically, publishers who have very
rich content, who want to monetize that search experience, this is where keeping your users
on your site being able to find the information, the pages that they're looking for, the content
they're looking for is very, very vital in terms of both your revenues, as well as, you
know, maintaining traffic on your--to your site. And here you basically get a rev-share
if you have associated your AdSense account with the custom search engine. It's immediate,
and you start getting--sharing in the revenues on the ads as well. So there's a strong monetization
model built into you--introduced for you. And you can create, you know, your results--
typically, many of them use the iFrame model, which is that you just embed the iFrame with
the look and feel changes on to your site. But if you are a large partner, you can also
get direct results in XML format. And then, for developers, again, you might want to focus
on some of these APIs that we offer as well as the capabilities, like link to custom search
engines or dynamic custom search engines that we offer. So, you have customize--API/custom
search, API/AJAX search, which might be very useful for you to play with, create some fantastic
applications. And if you do that, you know, please let us know on our user forums. We
actually have a link right to my website on the custom search website, as well as on the
resources page. Please, let us know if you've created some interesting applications or if
you have some challenges that we can help address. So, before I finish, I just want
to kind of run through a customer experience. This is eHealthInsurance and this talks to,
you know, why search is so important in terms of the navi--as a navigational tool.
>> JOHN CELONA: Hi, my name is John Celona, Vice President and Product Manager of eHealthInsurance.com.
EHealthInsurance.com is the leading online source of health insurance for individuals
to families and small businesses in the U.S. Our domain was the first one that created
online shopping experience for health insurance [INDISTINCT]. We were an early doctor at Google
Site Search, because we knew that Google Site Search is a product that consumers have come
to expect to find when shopping online. So, not having it was potentially costing our
business. To demonstrate, here are two [INDISTINCT] website visitors, Chris and Austin. Those
costumers who want to know if short-term health insurance includes dental-vision benefits.
Chris likes to look and view our website and wants to navigate through the links to get
his answer. Austin on the other hand, seeks the search box right away and doesn't waste
any time. Let's get there. Three seconds and Austin has his answer. With Google Site Search,
our costumers can really find their products and have access to relevant information. At
costumers. This feedback has been a great help to us to design our product roadmap.
Chris is still navigating. Chris has also now found his information after 32 seconds.
Pretty [INDISTINCT] but certainly coming close to the efficiency of Google Site Search. I
hope you enjoy our demo. Test it out with your site and notice the difference.
>> MUKHERJEE: Let's skip that one. Let me quickly talk a little bit about monetization
and keywords. So this is some data from a specific large costumer of ours, where they
did a case study. What I wanted to focus on here was a feature that we have in Custom
Search that we have, you know, called keywords. So, with every custom search engine that you
define, you actually have the ability to provide specific keywords, keywords that are on topic
of your search engine. So, for example, if your search engine is about football, you
can actually, you know, in terms around football, soccer or football, goal, et cetera. And that
defines the overall sort of set of keywords that define the topic of your search engine.
What we--Specific CSC, we actually use those keywords as hints, to actually either narrow
down the topicality of the ad--of the ads, or even look at other ads that might be--that
might be viable in the option. So this study--and I'll just go over a couple of these interesting
kind of data sets that we've gotten from this--from this specific case study. The first thing
is that, when they implemented--so they had a proprietary search solution that they had
built in-house, and they switch that to Custom Search. So that's the context. Now, the moment
they did that, the first thing they saw was, with CSE they saw much shorter query lengths.
So, the query length actually was immediately shorter. Sixteen percent, you know, shorter
than--well, 16 percent longer with, you know, with the proprietary solution. And the reason
probably for that was, I mean, and the reason that they came up for this was, they actually
were able to find things faster with shorter keywords. I think--they just found--the search
engine was behaving better in terms of relevance and finding the pages faster. And this was
not that they were trying to do more queries, because actually what they found was, that
the total number of clicks on the results also went up. So, earlier, not the number--the
total number have actually--we also measured not just clicks, but also good clicks. So
there are ways to measure, you know, the total number of engagements of the user with the
results, but also whether the user actually found the results or not. The second aspect
was the ads in the higher revenue. So what they did was they added keywords. So they
did the test with and without keywords and--so the first one was just, you know, proprietary
was a CSE and the second part was CSE keywords plus ads. So they had the CSE without keywords
and the CSE with keywords and what they noticed was when they added these--the appropriate
keywords and these are hand-tuned keywords. They actually had 8.5 percent greater coverage
in terms of the ads, as well as much higher faster click, that is the ads were actually
more relevant potentially to their users, and the RPM went up significantly by about
23 percent. So they were ecstatic when they actually did this test. And the point of this
is that, when we add the keywords, it may actually, you know, give you the option to
actually provide much better monetization, if you already have a CSE. So for those of
you who actually have CSEs on their sites, you might want to look into this feature and
see if, you know, if it actually helps with your revenues. So, I have a few questions
to wrap up and then, I can take questions. I just wanted to ask, how many of you in this
audience do not have any type of search on your site? I don't believe this, because I've
seen lots of sites and lots of, you know, lots of the--lots of the people who actually,
you know, entered questions into the--into the spreadsheet, you know, actually had--I
went and checked out the sites and they didn't have search on their sites. Now, let me clarify
one thing, some people have structured databases and in terms of their applications and they
have a very structured search. So, for example, I think the site we saw today, the travel
site, actually has search on their site, absolutely. So, they have like, the city that they're
traveling from, the city they're traveling to, and so it's a structured search. So I'm
not talking necessary only about data application. I'm talking about free-form search as well.
So as an example, if you look at Orbitz.com, which is a very popular travel destination
in the U.S., they have their structured search, but they also have a little search box on
top, which allows people to just enter free-form queries. So you can actually just go in and
type Hawaii, you might not, you know, type in--you might not know, for example, that
you're actually traveling from place A to place B on so and so date. So you're not engaging
yet with the application, but you might want to just search for, you know, what's so special
on Hawaii, right? And so, they have actually created this search experience which is a
combo search experience, both the--the application, which is their application that they are actually
providing, but also specific search as a navigational tool. So let me ask the question again, how
many of you have a free text search box on your site or don't have a free text search
box on your site? Okay, a few more hands. How many of you don't have--don't have Custom
Search on your site? I think people are asleep. Okay, let me ask you again. How many of you
don't have Custom Search on your site? All right, good. So, for those of you who don't
have search on your site, all who don't have Custom Search on your site, I have a request,
a homework assignment for you. How many of you have five minutes? Oh, come on, come on.
How many of you have five minutes? You spend two hours traveling to this conference.
>> We have five hours but we don't have five minutes.
>> MUKHERJEE: You don't have five minutes because of the travel. Okay, no, no, come
on. Let me ask you this question. How many of you have five minutes to spare? Okay, great.
So you have a homework assignment, go look up custom search engine, create one for yourself.
Whether it's just for fun, you know, for your own, you know, topic of interest, your, you
know, your favorite Bollywood sites or, you know, all your special topics of interest
or your universities. In fact, go and check out your universities that you went to and
see if they have search on their site. And that's--that's an interesting feedback as
well. And I'd love for you to play with it, look up the features, and you know, see if
it makes sense for you, and you might--you might see that, it's great for your personal
use or for your company's use. And in fact, if your company site doesn't have search on
their site, you know, you should really be asking the questions as to why they don't
have navigation--I mean, search as a navigational tool.