We have several important announcements that may affect your Custom Search Engine or may require you to make changes to your Custom Search Engine. Please read this post carefully.
Custom Search Engine (CSE) is a great way to build custom search experiences for your website visitors. The search space is evolving rapidly and we want to make sure that CSE continues to evolve to meet the needs of your users, whether they are visiting from desktop or mobile devices. In order for us to achieve this, we first need to clean up some older access points that cannot support the improvements we will be adding.
Beginning in April 2017, the following API access points, and some associated features, will no longer be available:
Feature | How to tell if you are using it | What to do instead |
| Look for the javascript google.search.CustomSearchControl | |
| Look for an http request containing a ‘cref’ parameter | |
| | |
Dynamically extracted links | An included or excluded site uses the “Dynamically extract links from this page” option | |
Autocomplete Removals | Search Features → Autocomplete → Custom Autocompletions → excluded or excluded patterns | There will no longer be a way to exclude certain autocompletions. |
Autocomplete Promotions | Search Features → Autocomplete → Custom Autocompletions → promotions | There will no longer be a way to show promotions inside autocompletions; however, normal promotions will continue to work. |
Ads UI style customization | Look for custom Ad Styles in the AdSense frontend under My Ads → Search Ads → Settings | The Ads UI will now be updated to use the styling of organic search results, which can be updated in the Look and Feel tab of the CSE control panel |
We recognize that making these changes may be inconvenient, but cleaning up these old interfaces will allow us to focus on many new and exciting improvements to CSE. We will be modernizing the look and feel of CSE for both desktop and mobile users, improving uptime and latency, and working on the quality of our search results and autocomplete. We look forward to delivering a better CSE experience for webmasters and your website visitors alike.
