Google Site Search Plugin

Provides close integration for FarCry projects with the Google Site Search service.

License: LGPL

Code, documentation, bug tracking, etc:

Google Custom Search enables you to create a search engine for your website, your blog, or a collection of websites. You can fine-tune the ranking, customize the look and feel of the search results, and invite your friends or trusted users to help you build your custom search engine.

Features include:

  • webtop configuration
  • support for page mapping custom content attributes
  • example search result templates

The solution requires an active Google Site Search service. This is a paid service available from Google:

AOC were burning through their search quota on Google Site Search, but checking analytics showed very few user based searches. Turns out it was google indexing search results like this:

http://london2012.olympics.com.au/search?q=thorpe

Every hit deducts from the Site Search quota. This leads to googlebot rechecking the same url as well as driving more traffic (and other search bots) to search results pages – bit of a vicious circle!

It’s critical to remove search results pages from bots by using robots.txt

If the results have already made their way into the Google index you want to remove them immediately. Use Google Webmaster Tools to request the removal. Make sure you change the drop-down to select Remove Directory.