Pimp Your Google Search

Posted by: Rob Hof on October 24

Google on Tuesday will announce a way to customize your Google searches through a new feature called Google Co-op:

Build and customize your own search engine

* Specify the sites you want to include in searches.
* Place a search box and search results on your website.
* Customize the look and feel to match your website.
* Invite your community to contribute to the search engine.
* Make money from relevant ads in your search results.

As Mike Arrington at TechCrunch notes, this is not new, since Rollyo, Eurekster, and Yahoo! have similar tools (not to mention Amazon.com’s downsized A9.)

Om Malik likes the idea but thinks Google needs to do more:

By getting folks to build their own vertical search engines, the company is trying to blunt the efforts of some of the VC funded vertical search engines5. It is also using “people’s power” to fine tune their own search index. My inner cynic thinks this is – distributed search optimization effort.

However, the problem is that they are not giving any real incentive for people to do that. The share of Adsense bounty is just the same as on a plain vanilla site. It should increase the payouts to the search builders. They are getting more focused search results (hence higher click throughs for their ad), so why not share the profits with folks who are doing the heavy lifting.

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