Custom Search Engines – A Powerful Research Tool
Written June 19th, 2007 by Ed BennettGoogle recently offered a new service – Google Custom Search Engines (CSE) that lets you build a search engine focused on a pre-defined group of websites. The idea is simple, but very powerful.
As a test, I built four search engines this weekend and put them here: www.hospital-search.org
The four CSE’s limit searches to the following groups :
58 Maryland Hospitals
15 Washington D.C. hospitals
142 U.S. Medical Schools
170 U.S. News & World Report Hospitals
By limiting the websites to a known group, the quality of the results skyrockets. For example, my CEO is interested in creating a CEO Message on our site. Doing a search for CEO message in these search engines brought back pages of relevant results. Each one was from a hospital or medical school, and was useful for my research.
Here are a few samples:
Podcasts (in Top Hospitals)
Ask A Doctor (in Top Hospitals)
Pediatrics Residency (in US Medical Schools)
This is just a start, please check these out and let me know what you think. I’m sure you can come up with dozens of CSE’s that could be useful in our industry. All you need is an idea and good list of web sites.
Ed Bennett
Director, Web Strategy
University of Maryland Medical System
June 19th, 2007 at 2:32 pm
A great tool, Ed. Thanks.
June 20th, 2007 at 1:09 pm
Ed,
First of all, thank you for introducing me to Webiscope. There is an enormous wealth of information and experience here and I look forward to getting to know the regulars!
Google CSE is a valuable tool, and you have created a great resource.
I discovered the Google CSE a few weeks ago when looking for a way to search the text of our Faculty Profiles. Our IT group had not gotten around to modifying our Google appliance, so I took matters in to my own hands.
I am simply pointing the Google CSE to the directory where the profiles reside. I am still evaluating the results, but the CSE is returning pretty reliable results. I have noticed that some pages have not yet been seen by Google. When that comes to my attention, I manually add the url of the specific page to the custom search, using a “Google Marker” which sits in the favorites file on IE, or as a bookmark tab in FF. Google seems to find those pages within 48 hours.
I am sure there are many more undiscovered uses for this new tool from Google.
Larry Roberts
Director of Web Communications
University of Maryland School of Medicine
June 20th, 2007 at 1:45 pm
Very cool idea. I can foresee a trend in these “search farms” springing up with pages and pages of specialized search engines.
June 20th, 2007 at 1:54 pm
These engines will make my job of recruiting new Webiscope participants a less arduous task. Just try searching for “webmaster” and you’ll see what I mean.
June 20th, 2007 at 2:23 pm
Larry – welcome aboard! I look forward to your contributions and insights. Larry handles the “other” U of MD Medical site, for the School of Medicine. Check it out here:
http://medschool.umaryland.edu/
It recently had a graphic re-design and looks great.
Ed
June 21st, 2007 at 9:24 am
Ed – Thanks for sharing. This is a very useful tool — across multiple applications. This furthers the trend of aggregating the niches. I wonder if you Wiki-ize something like this whether the “invisible hand” will do a good job of reducing noise to near zero so the niche areas can be searched efficiently? That is, users decide what sites are reliable sources for a particular niche?
- Chris
June 22nd, 2007 at 8:48 am
Chris – good ideas. The CSE is set up so that many people can contribute to a single search engine. A well edited CSE will have very little noise, and thus greater value – but it will require time and attention by the CSE editor. I think we will see some interesting money-making CSE’s in the commercial sector. Of course my CSE’s don’t run ads.