Google Co-op – Experiment # 2

Yesterday’s post was about using Google’s new Custom Search Engine (CSE aka Google Co-op) to make a closed network the exclusive universe for a custom search.  Presumably this gives readers of the network search answers which they will think are relevant and credible.  It also presumably enhances the network effect for the sites in the network and helps them help each other crawl up and to the left on the long tail.  Today’s post is about a somewhat more open use of CSE.

(I believe CSE is a TLA you’ll be seeing a lot of so I’m going to keep using it.  TLA, of course, stands for Three Letter Acronym.)

My Way, The Entrepreneur Network is a collection of blogs by entrepreneurs which I coordinate. The closed search engine mentioned above searches My Way blogs only.  The new CSE searches not only My Way blogs but ALL entrepreneurial blogs recommended by My Way bloggers.  In other words, I’ve invited these bloggers to collaborate in adding to the universe of blogs relevant to entrepreneurial things and people.  Moreover, the new CSE  actually searches the entire web; it favors the blogs which we My Way bloggers have hand-selected but looks beyond them in responding to queries.

Your role in this experiment, should you choose to participate, is to use these two CSEs when you’re looking for entrepreneurial stuff and tell us which one in your view works better.  There is a way for me to tell which CSE gets used more so you are voting each time you make a choice (no registration required).  If you think that you get better results by searching the whole web than one of our restricted subsets, please comment on this post or on the My Way site and let us know.  That would also be an interesting result. The picture below shows the search boxes on the My Way home page.

You can also use these search boxes from the Fractals of Change blog site where they’re high in the left sidebar.  Some of the other My Way blogs may also support these search boxes.  Google also hosts search boxes for My Way Network only and for My Way Bloggers’ Choices which may get discovered through various tools being developed for the discovery of CSEs,

Experiment #3, when I get it done, will be an almost completely open use of the CSE capability.  Stay tuned.

Comments

[Panos]

Hi,
nice implementation of google coop.
I run coopdir.com wich is a free niche directory for coop cse only.

Please sybmit your cse for free and help other find it and use it.

[Rick (again)]

Here's the one I setup, btw: www.milwokee.com/search.htm

One thing I noticed... the adsense suck.

It's one big-ass javascript, google can't really read the search results and apply relevant ads. So they only put ads that are similar to the search term. Google will have to get more relevant with adsene to make any money off of it.

[Rick Stratton]

Really, takes about 30 minutes to do a setup and then add it to a site (or make a new straight html site). I set this one up to search only my favorite sites (like blog.tomevslin.com).

I think it's very cool. There's a huge buzz amongst the folks who buy & sell a bunch of domains.