My apologies if this has been covered elsewhere, I searched but I couldn't find anything about it. 

I'm just wondering if anyone is using Google's custom search business on their site.  If so, how is it working.  How does it work with pc?  I noticed early impact is using it on their site, I'm thinking of putting it on our site but would like a few opinions first, if possible.  Thanks!

p.s. I was the 666th member to join this forum, that can't be good, can it?

Our understanding is that the custom search engine uses the same index that is part of Google. So a page must be indexed and searchable on Google.com to also be part of the results of your custom search engine. So make sure that Google is building a good index of your store pages.

The approach to getting your store properly index is always the same: use the store map, sitemap, and lots of Well-designed, text-rich static pages to link to your catalog. Consider using the http://www.earlyimpact.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=69&PN=1 - SEO files too.

The custom Google search engine does allow you to set up additional filters to exclude portions of the indexed docoments. As far as we know, it does not allow you to "add" content. It's a subset of the Google index. You can only limit the results shown, not add to them.

We recently added to our Web site, and we believe it is working quite well. For example, you can now do a search that will include results from several different dynamic applications that you previously could not search at once. Specifically: Web pages, forum threads, Knowledge Base articles.

Just a note on the search results on our Web site: when you do a search on our Early Impact Web site using the custom Google search form, you will not see results from the ProductCart-powered demo stores. The reason is that they are not getting indexed on our Web site because we tell search engines to ignore them via "robots.txt"

Since search is key on a Web store, I spent some time on this topic and added an article to my blog, including an idea for implementation. Here we go: http://productcart.blogspot.com/2007/09/tips-tricks-using-custom-google-search.html - http://productcart.blogspot.com/2007/09/tips-tricks-using-cu stom-google-search.html

For ProductCart users, the suggestion for implementation included in the blog translates into the modification of "pc/search.asp", where the Google Custom Search Engine search form would be added at the top, before the ProductCart search form (make sure not to nest the two forms, but rather keep them separate).

I'm interested to know if other ProductCart users end up giving this a try.  Do you think that it improves the customer experience? Will your customers like it? Post your findings here.

Cheers,

massimo

Hi Massimo

Your blog is great, I would never of found it except for this forum. It needs to be easier found

Thanks for the kind words. I wish I had more time to dedicate to that sort of thing. ProductCart keeps us busy!

Cheers!

massimo