Make Google Search Work for You

Unless you’re a million-dollar developer, you probably don’t have as much experience working in say, Internet search, as say, the Google. The Google is really good at search and it made my dinky search engine for my site look like a bumbling dinosaur, so when I noticed it took 7 hours more my search to return its results, I figured I may not have the most robust search possible. Here’s what it looked like before:

So sought for some professional help. I researched and found out that Google doesn’t let you put their results into your site through any sort of iframe, which was unfortunate because I wanted to keep the search within my site.

I knew that Google’s advertising site AdSense had a search option, so I logged in with my account and set up an search ad stream.

There’s an option to search just the sites I want (awesome) and I could direct the searchers to a page on my site (awesomer). They want users to put their search form field on the site but that would have conflicted with my .Net site, so I just took the resultant query string and swapped out the q= value with the search string in my search method and voila! I integrated Google search into my site:

It looks better and it’s so much faster than my search, I can’t handle it. Of course, your users will have to put up with a bunch of ads all over their search, but it’s still better than the alternative and I get a little bit of that revenue, so it’s a win-win. Good job the Google!