Google Co-op — An Intro & Some Insider Hacks

http://www.google.com/coop

So what is it? It’s called Google Co-op, a platform which enables users to build their own vertical search engines and make money off the advertisements. It provides a clean, easy interface for simple site restrictions (like what Yahoo! Search Builder and Live Macros offer) plus a number of power user features for tweaking the search results. The user has control over the look and feel (to embed the search box on their own site), can rank results, and even (multi) tag sites to let viewers filter out results by category.

But talk is cheap. So let me show you some examples of what you can do with Co-op:

http://vik.singh.googlepages.com/techstuff

This is a technology specific search engine, which lets users refine results based off Google Topics (global labels which anyone can annotate with). Basically, I was lazy here. I didn’t feel like multi-tagging sites/domains individually, so instead I just collected a laundry list of popular technology site domains in a flat file and pasted it into Google Co-op’s Custom Search Engine control panel/sites page. In addition, something I think is really useful, Google Co-op allows users to bulk upload links from OPML files. So, to make my life easier when building this, I uploaded Scoble’s and Matt Cutt’s OPML’s. Tons of great links there (and close to 1000 total). Then I clicked on the ‘filter results to just the sites I listed’ option (which I recommend you use since if you muddle your results with normal Google web search’s you typically won’t see your results popping up on the first page of results despite the higher priority level promise for hand chosen sites). To enable the filters you see on the results page (Reviews, Forums, Shopping, Blogs, etc.), I did an intersection with the background label of my search engine and the Google Topics labels. How do you that? The XML context configuration exposes a <BackgroundLabels> tag. Any labels listed in the BackgroundLabels block will be AND’ed (how cool is that). So I added the label of my search engine (each search engine has a unique background label – it can be found bolded on the Advanced Tab page) and a Google Topic label (News, Reviews, Stores, Shopping_Comparison, Blogs, Forums, etc.) in the BackgroundLabels XML block. I made a separate XML context file for each Google Topic intersection. By doing this, I didn’t have to tag any of my results and was still able to provide search filters. Google Topics does most of the hardwork and gives me search refinements for free!

But say you’re not lazy. Here’s an example of what you can do with multi-tagging and refinements.

http://vik.singh.googlepages.com/machinelearningsearch2

This one is more of a power user example – notice the refinements onebox on the search results page, and the labels with “>>” at the end. These labels redirect to another label hierarchy (a hack, I used the label redirect XML option to link to other custom search engine contexts – basically I’m nesting search engines here)

Now, say you want to get fancy with the search results presentation. Here’s a way to do it with Google’s Ajax Search API:

http://www.google.com/uds/samples/cse/index.html

Thanks to Mark Lucovsky and Matt Wytock for developing that great example.
For more information about how to use the Ajax Search API with Custom Search, please take a look at this informative post: http://googleajaxsearchapi.blogspot.com/2006/10/custom-search-engine-support.html

While writing this blog post, I realized it would take me forever to go over the number of tricks one can pull with Co-op. Instead, I’ll summarize some of the big selling point features to encourage everyone to start hacking away. Also, to help jump start power users, I’ve linked the XML files I used to make my featured search examples at the bottom of this post.

Key Feature Summary (in no particular order):

• Make money (get a share off the ad clicks)
• Multi-label sites
• Have up to 5000 annotations
• Can collaborate with friends to tag sites (I’ve made my search engines public so anyone can add their annotations)
• Can associate weights to results and have control over the rankings (refer to the <score> tag in the XML)
• Completely brand the engine and customize the look and feel
  • Ex. http://vik.singh.googlepages.com/techstuff
• Can display refinements on the search results page
  • Ex. http://vik.singh.googlepages.com/machinelearningsearch2
• Can upload XML/OPML files filled with links
• Can upload XML to configure the search engine labels/contexts
• Can even nest label hierarchies on the refinements onebox
  • Ex. http://vik.singh.googlepages.com/machinelearningsearch2 .. click on Sources
• Can make the search Ajax’y
  • Ex. http://www.google.com/uds/samples/cse/index.html
• Can combine results with another person’s search results
  • (by intersecting the background labels in the XML advanced configuration file)

and much much more (especially for power users).

If you need a search engine for your site, and your content has been indexed by Google, then seriously consider using this rather than building your own index – or worse, using the crappy full-text functions available in relational databases.

Here are my XML files:

ml-context.xml

ml-pop-context.xml

ml-complx-context.xml

ml-source-context.xml

tech-stuff-context.xml

techreviews.xml

techforums.xml

techshopping.xml

techblogs.xml

technews.xml

tech-stuff-scoble-annotations.xml

tech-stuff-matcutts-annotations.xml

Happy Coop hacking!