Travelocity.com is one of the first Google Site Search customers to implement autocompletions on their website. By doing so, they have provided an easy way for Travelocity users to explore and discover new destinations by suggesting the most popular queries based on the first few letters the user inputs.
To turn this feature on, please check the "Enable autocompletions" option in the Basics tab of your search engine. It may take several hours to start seeing autocompletions once you enabled them in the control panel.
For more information about how to turn on autocompletions for your Google Site Search engine, see our autocompletions Help Page.
Autocompletion is compatible with other new Google Site Search features including themes and mobile search capabilities – which can significantly enhance your users’ mobile experience. As with all Google Site Search features, every new development is rolled out free of charge for all customers.
You can learn more about these and other exciting new features by joining an upcoming webinar:
With Google Site Search's new data rendering features, you can enable the return of search results in whatever format you’d like. You can control the size and position of images, personalize the attributes that are shown, insert lines of metadata into search results, and much more.
You can find more about the technical implementation details on the Google AJAX API blog, and can add Google Site Search to your website by visiting google.com/sitesearch.
Posted by David Gibson and Nicholas Weininger, Software Engineers
Back in 2008, Adobe began to use the power of Google Site Search to “plug the whole community brain trust right into the Creative Suite,” as we liked to say.
Now with the launch of Adobe® Creative Suite 5, we’ve taken that brain trust to a whole new level with the introduction of our new Community Help application. It’s an Adobe AIR®-based companion that’s automatically installed as part of any new Adobe CS5 product.
Launched directly from the Help menu of any CS5 product, the Community Help application enables customers to:
find fast answers with powerful new search options that let them focus results to just Adobe content, community content, developer resources, or even code samples
download core Adobe Help and language reference content for offline viewing (thanks to the Adobe AIR runtime)
see what the community thinks is the best, most valuable content via ratings and comments
share their expertise with others and find out what experts have to say about using their favorite Adobe product
Google Site Search: integration and innovation
Under the hood of the Community Help app lies our Google Site Search engine. This search engine searches across about 3000 sites – content such as product Help, language references, Tech Notes, Developer Connection articles, and Adobe TV videos as well as the best online content from the Adobe community. Content is chosen by experts at Adobe and in the design and developer communities, meaning customers find the answers they need faster.
Thanks to the robust Google Site Search APIs, the development team was not only able to easily integrate search results but also create unique innovations such as our new Code Search functionality. Formerly known as Blueprint, this new search option allows Adobe Flash® and Flex developers to search for relevant code samples so that they can write better code, faster.
A new definition of Help
By combining the best community content with the definitive reference that customers traditionally expect from Adobe, Community Help allows us to expand the definition what help means. Now users can tap into an entire ecosystem of content — one that can dynamically adjust to changing user needs and provide a much richer set of resources over the lifetime of the product.
Community Help can also be used as a standalone application. To give it a try, you can download it from adobe.com.
Mark Nichoson, Product Manager at Adobe Community Help
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If you’d like to learn more about what Google Site Search can do for your website, join us for this upcoming webinar:
Google Site Search users can easily set up their themes through the admin control panel, which also manages everything from refinement labels to On-Demand Indexing. By clicking on the "Look and Feel" tab, you can choose between three primary layouts and six styles for your Google Site Search. Each style has a unique color scheme, text format, and search box appearance to fit in with the rest of your site.
If you love a style, but need to tweak it, you can customize it further by changing fonts, colors, backgrounds, promotion settings, as well as interactive features such as tabbing and mouse-overs. The preview function instantly shows you the effects of your changes, so you can keep iterating until your search results look just right.
What’s more, Google Site Search allows for further customization through a number of different features and capabilities such as the XML results feed, JSON, or our brand new custom data rendering features – tools that web developers with programming experience can use for more advanced results. With Themes, however, you can make major layout and formatting changes to your search experience right through your control panel, without having HTML, CSS, or JavaScript editing.
Google Site Search is constantly adding new features. We recently added mobile support for Custom and Site Search as well as support for rich snippets and easier synonym management, among many other enhancements made in 2009. Needless to say, we have ongoing new features and enhancements planned for 2010.
See how easy it is to put the power of Google search to work for your website.
That’s why the Google Site Search team has made it easy to enable users to search your website from devices like Android-powered phones, iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, and Palm Pre.
As a Google Site Search customer, you can repurpose your content to mobilize your web site. You can use the Site Search home page that we create for you as the preferred mobile entry point for your website. All the Google Site Search features - themes, result biasing, promotions, refinement labels, rich snippets, synonym enhancements, etc. – are available on the mobile version as well.
Additionally, if you customize Google Site Search on your website, those features will show up on your mobile home page. If you select or change the theme for your search engine, your mobile home page will automatically pick up those changes. Mobile results will also display thumbnails and actions if you have marked up your pages.
Google Site Search lets you customize search results in several ways to make sure items you want featured reach the top of the results list. With top result biasing, you can target the top search results from specific sections of your website (such as your product catalog or newsletter sign up page) to make sure visitors can find the most relevant pages within your site.
Site admins can also choose to organize search results based on the age of the documents with something we call date biasing. If you want to make sure that, say, a new PDF makes it to the top of the results rather than an outdated version, you can switch on date biasing and decide the level of influence (low, medium, high or maximum) so visitors can easily find the most recent version.
These are only two of the suite of customization features that are available with Google Site Search. To learn more, visit google.com/sitesearch.
Posted by Anna Bishop, Google Enterprise Search team
Although this functionality has been available to GSS users through subscribed links, today's changes make promoting the best links more speedy and intuitive, and allow admins to add multiple promotions for the same query.
Stay tuned to this blog for upcoming enhancements to Google Site Search (and more). We hope you like the business results that this new Promotions feature delivers.
Posted by NitinMangtani, Lead Product Manager, Google Enterprise Search
Since Google Site Search leverages our web search platform, Google Site Search customers can benefit from this new functionality as well. In fact, Google Site Search customers can define their own custom attributes that we'll index and return with your site search results. In addition to microformats and RDFa, you can also provide custom metadata within your webpages via special markup called page maps. A page map identifies specific attributes that are recognized and preserved by Google at index time, and returned along with search results for presentation to the user.
So if you're using Google Site Search on your website, you can now control further how your content appears in search results. You can showcase key information, such as image thumbnails, summaries, ratings in your result snippets if you provide the appropriate markup on your pages.
Rich Snippets attribute information for Google Site Search is only returned in XML (via <PageMap> tags), so you can use your own customized presentation controls. Indexing of the rich snippets information can have unspecified latency, as some pages are indexed and refreshed more frequently than others, and page map attributes may not be indexed from all web pages.
As an illustration of Rich Snippets, the web page featured in the following example provides custom information about an image thumbnail that is displayed in the rich snippet of the result along with date, author and category information.
If you are getting results back via XML, then the custom attributes are returned in the results within the PageMap tag, as shown below. You can parse the DataObjects within the PageMap tag and provide customized presentation of the relevant attributes.
If you are new to Google Site Search and would like to provide Google quality search results on your website, visit www.google.com/sitesearch
Posted by Nitin Mangtani, Lead Product Manager, Google Enterprise Search
