If you find yourself searching the same sites and using the same criteria over and over, you can simplify things and save yourself a lot of time by using Google's Custom Search.

The feature, which can be found here, started as a service to give webmasters the ability to embed a Google search box that searches their webpage. But even if you don't have a site you need to index, search, and serve ads against, Google Custom Search can be a powerful tool for any workflow that queries the internet.

If you're familiar with Google's search operators such as "site:" and "filetype:", Google Custom Search basically sets up a search that appends those predefined criteria to whatever you type in a box. The feature gives that box a page and a unique URL. There's a lot of repetitive searches that can be streamlined, and for the most part, the obvious ones already exist.

A generous netizen realized he was trying to search Reddit through Google on a regular basis, so he made his own Google Custom Search and gave it the URL searchreddit.com. If you're looking for ebooks of dubious legality (purely for evaluation purposes, of course) check out this ebook search engine. In fact, there's an entire directory of premade custom searches at customsearchengine.com.

There are plenty of reasons why you'd want to do the majority of your searching through a custom search engine instead of using the Chrome Omnibar or through Google.com. The main draw is efficiency and automation. But beyond that, Google "personalizes" your search results so that you might be missing exactly what you're looking for (i.e., something you haven't found before). Google Custom Search gives you more control over which slice of the internet you're looking at. Also, some queries (especially for products to buy) have been gamed to the point where the SEO crap outnumbers the useful results. You can get past this by using a Google Custom Search that limits your search to only the stores and blogs you'd want to visit, cutting out sites like Shopbuy and About.com.

Making a Google Custom Search is straightforward. There's a lovely GUI that should be good enough for most uses. But if you want to get into the weeds, there's a whole API for hacking in increased functionality. Go to google.com/cse/create/new to get started. There, you'll find an entry box to add sites to search. Google Custom Search supports searching up to 5,000 sites, so go nuts, especially with wildcards. It even supports image search. If you don't have sites in mind, there's a keywords tool that will take user terms and spit out a list of sites Google recommends you search.



If you want to fine-tune your search engine, you can upload XML files under the Advanced tab. In fact, with a little tweaking, you can import an OPML file exported from Google Reader or other RSS readers. Inside the Annotations XML file is where you can add advanced search operators, such as filetype, excluded terms, and time to your search engine. That file is also the place to add related terms or suggested autocomplete strings.

If you want to make your favorite Custom search more convenient, here's how you integrate it with Chrome's address bar. There's obviously no real limit to the power of Google Custom Searches, so if you've got a favorite, drop it in the comments.

[Google Custom Search]