Experiments with Google Custom Search engine

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This post is loosely related to Oracle, as I wanted to have a single point of entry search page for my Oracle-related searching – which I could bring up with pressing a hotkey combination.

Google has a thing called Custom Search Engine, which allows you define custom search engine rules, sites to include, exclude etc. Therefore you can demote or completely exclude some unwanted sites from your search results. Alberto Dell’Era just commented on this on Jonathan Lewis’es blog entry about Firefox.

CSE sounded promising, but the problem is that if you sign up for the free custom search service, Google will show its adverts on the result page without such filtering, which still can lead you to some crap sites out there.

Anyway, the search page I use is available here (both for download and online use), feel free to use it if the adverts don’t bother you.

http://tanelpoder.com/search/

To be fair to you, I also mention that if anyone clicks on advert links in CSE results, Google pays the search engine creator (me) money… I doubt if I ever become a billionaire because of that, but if it pays the yearly $25 I spend on WordPress domain mapping and custom CSS, I’d be happy :)
if you don’t like that fact, feel free to take the simple source code of my page and modify it for your own needs.

Ok, next post will be about a good use-case for ORADEBUG for crashing reluctant-to-die server processes, I hope this makes up for my spam post here… (hmm… can one actually spam their own blog?)

Update: Note that I haven’t explicitly excluded any sites from the search results, I have just marked the ones I like and those are given a better ranking than other sites. However its still possible you see junk sites in results when you search for some specific keywords. Anyway, my search page is intended just as an example, feel free to customize yourself a search engine matching exactly your needs.