1) Provide onsite search!
If you've been thinking of adding a search option to your site or a customer's site but end up with a head ache... Instead create a custom engine that searches the entire site or through specific portions of your site (like FAQs, manuals, or similar). This can buy you time if you decide to go with a technology provider or server software application, or you may decide to stick with the custom search.

While there are often free, paid, or low cost scripts that are offered in most web hosting and blog packages, they often return results in a haphazard fashion. It can be argued that search engines often present the results in a more 'relevant' fashion. Since the search comes from a third party, your site needs to well spidered/indexed. If a web spider has problems getting through your site, pages may be lost or unavailable through the custom search engine. But this might turn into a pro, because you can then investigate the issue, fix it, and it may inadvertently help your rankings.

2) Create Your Own Shopping Engine!
I have several sites that I love to shop at online but they usually don't show up in searches through shopping engines like MySimon, Froogle, Y! Shopping, or similar. On the corporate side, I also know that many supplier web sites and wholesale sites don't tend to appear in the shopping engines. With a custom engine I can create my own 'engine' and search for products based on sites a list of sites that I already know and like, i.e a search based on suppliers from my industry, sites with a theme that also sell products, and more.

This holiday season, one of my co-workers is going to get a stapler. But not just any stapler, the red Swingline from Office Space. While I may not get a nice list of compared prices out of a custom search, such as you might see on a MySimon page like this:

If I perform a search in a custom engine that I've set up with a few preferred e-stores, techie/geek news sites...
(type in red Swingline in the search box below to see custom search results):

I actually find the red swing line that I'm looking for on sites like ThinkGeek or TechComedy. Since I've shopped with ThinkGeek in the past... sold!

3) Tie Your Affiliated Sites Together.
If you run an affiliate program, you can use a custom search engine to help tie your official dealers together in one searchable location for customers. Remember that 'affiliate program' can take on many sizes and shapes... Realtors, brokers, and similar industries often have a wide variety of personal, city, state, regional, and country based web sites that are not always tied to one another. Sometimes the cost and hassle in maintaining hundreds of a web sites, let alone communicating to all of these members is a real hassle. A custom search engine requires at least one person to maintain a list and update this list from time to time. If one, some, or all of the affiliated sites choose to implement the custom engine, they simply include some fairly generic engine code on their site and the actual technology provider, i.e. Google, keeps the underlying technology up to date and the list keeper keeps Google up to date with the affiliates sites to include in the search.

4) Political Machine.
Are you political? Have an agenda? Tie sites together that support your cause and provide a search on these sites. If you do not want it to become an echo chamber, tie together sites from the opposing viewpoints as well. You can either allow site visitors to search on their own or perform some basic research based on these searches, for your visitors.

5) Teachers and Libraries.
Teachers and libraries want to provide children with a positive search experience yet there are mixed feelings regarding the picking and choosing of sites and the use of censor software. Some times useful sites can be blocked inadvertently with the bad. Yet, there are always recommended books and online resources that teachers and libraries can safely advocate... Why not make these resources searchable? Sure there is Google Scholar, but I can't see most teachers and children who are pre-college finding a lot of use from this site which often presents research papers on topics. However a custom engine that searched only through sites like National Geographic, PBS.org, official zoo and museum web sites, and similar sites would be a huge boon to educators of all levels. Plus some of these custom engine technologies are collaborative in nature, so that teachers, students, and parents can decide which engines are suggested and/or make it into a custom engine.

Hopefully these examples have sparked a few ideas on how you too might implement a custom search engine. I encourage you to experiment and see how this customization can work for your site.

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