Programmable Search Engine Blog: 2019

Programmable Search Engine Blog

The latest news, updates and tips from the Programmable Search Engine team

Bringing the Power of Knowledge Graph to Custom Search

Wednesday, July 10, 2019

We're happy to announce that Custom Search Engine (CSE) owners can now use Knowledge Graph entities to configure their CSE. The Knowledge Graph (KG) is used by Google Search to help users discover information more quickly and easily, and contains millions of entries that describe real-world entities like people, places, and things.

CSE owners can use KG Entities to

Define which pages the CSE searches
Create Refinements to narrow down search results within a CSE.

For more information about using Knowledge Graph Entities to define and refine your Custom Search Engine, visit our developer documentation.

Here are some examples of what you can do:

Searching the entire web for specific Entities

CSE's KG Entity support makes it easy to search the entire web for pages (or images) about specific topics.
We've configured this CSE to search the entire web for pages about Alphabet companies, using the CSE control panel as shown below:

Try out the CSE here: https://cse.google.com/cse?cx=000888210889775888983:b2bhygxt4le

Searching specific pages for Entities

Instead of searching the entire web, you can combine KG entities with CSE's existing site search functionality.
For example, we've configured this CSE to search Wikipedia for pages about the entity Pittsburgh:

Try out the CSE here: https://cse.google.com/cse?cx=000888210889775888983:x1jaj-jlc3e

Defining Refinements with Entities

CSE's refinements feature allows users to drill down into their search results. Now, CSE owners can use KG entities to define the refinements if their CSE.

For example, we defined this CSE to be about the Knowledge Graph Entity "basketball":

Then we add refinements for basketball subtopics, like the NBA, WNBA, College, Olympic basketball, and basketball gear. For example, this refinement returns pages that are about both Basketball (from the top-level CSE definition) and Sports Equipment, Shoes, or Jerseys:

Try out the CSE here: https://cse.google.com/cse?cx=000888210889775888983:-nzsrilglze

Google

Introducing Callbacks for even more rendering control

Monday, June 24, 2019

For our power users that are interested in customizing the rendering of search results beyond what is possible through our standard controls in the Custom Search Engine control panel, we are introducing a new set of Callback functions that will unlock new capabilities to customize your search result rendering even further.

Callbacks provide an opportunity to customize the experience during the rendering flow of the search results in powerful new ways. We are introducing callbacks for when the search begins, when the results are ready, and when the results are rendered. If you would like to augment your results with additional information or increased interactivity, callbacks provide an easy way to build on top of the already existing customizations you have for Custom Search Engine.

Please note that this feature only applies to the Custom Search Element API of the Custom Search Engine. These Callbacks are not applicable to the JSON API of the Custom Search Engine. Also, these callbacks only modify the organic search results; they do not modify any of the advertising or the rendering of the advertising returned from the Custom Search Element API.

Learn how to use these new functions in the Search Callbacks section of the Custom Search Element API for more details.

We are excited to see what new customizations our vibrant and creative publisher ecosystem will bring to Customized Search Engines with these new callbacks.

We would like to hear your feedback and comments on this new functionality. We invite you to share your thoughts in our user forum.

The Google Custom Search Engine Team

Google

Improving our mobile layout

Monday, April 22, 2019

We are pleased to announce a new mobile layout that should provide an improved experience for mobile device users. We’ve changed the look of the search box and refinements, increased the size of the thumbnails, and simplified the pagination.

Before After

Most of these changes only affect mobile devices, but the refinements have also been updated for desktop.

Before After

The mobile-specific changes can be optionally disabled by setting the "mobileLayout" attribute of the search element to “disabled”.

Google

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