Gaga for Google Custom Search Engines Part 4 - REPLAY

Good morning and happy Friday to everybody. Let me make sure that I've got the right microphone setting here. Yes, I do. I'm on my headset. Do not adjust your television channels. There is nothing wrong with your image. I actually did get a haircut. Yes, I know it's kind of a big change. I thought it was just really time for a change, and I went and got my hair short. So anyway, long story, the reason is that actually my, my daughter decided to get a short haircut as well, so I just went along with her. And you know, I thought, hey, why not? It's time. I've been wearing my hair, you know, long for, for a while now. I actually can't even remember. I think it's been maybe 10 years. But anyway, the point is, it came off. So now you can see my, my male pattern baldness a little bit too well. But that's okay. I'll get over it. I actually kind of like having short hair. It's a lot easier. It's a lot less maintenance and a lot faster to get ready and so on. Before you ask, no, I am not going to be getting rid of the patented, um, bizarre facial thing wilderness that I got going on. That's, that's gonna stay for a while, I think. Um, but you never know, I might show up at the next Shelley's Alley with a completely different feature. So hopefully it won't shock you too much. So what are we talking about today? We are talking about custom search engines, and this is the semi-final episode in the series. We have one more episode where we will be talking about the schemas and other settings that we can use based on some of the patterns that have been identified by, by Google. But today we are here to talk about advanced settings, advanced settings that you can use in your custom search engine. So to that end, let me go ahead and share my screen. First and foremost, probably would be a good idea to show you what the customized version looks like, and then we'll talk a little bit about what all that means. What does customization mean? So here on your screen now, you should be able to see, or it should be coming into focus now, Zoom, zoom, zoom. Oh, I see I don't have my display shared, do I? Yes, I do. There it is. Okay, that's more like it. There we go. Okay, so up here, and yes, this is kind of small, but that's just the way that Custom Search Engine search box appears. It's designed to be able to be embedded into your website, so So they kind of make it, you know, pretty small, minimalistic. This is what it looks like when you actually land. By the way, you can use this, this search engine right now. This is my kind of practice one where I have a lot of different settings, which I'll show you in just a second. Let me put that into the Facebook chat so you can link to the actual search itself, and maybe also put it in here as well. See if I can Put it in the chat there. I don't know if that's going to go out to everybody, but we'll give it a try. So this is the search engine. Here's the preview on the right, and this is the full view, which changes once you actually execute a search. We've worked on this before. We've also worked on the LinkedIn one, but this one is kind of a little bit of a jack of all trades. You can see that my keywords here are Management team, staff, people, contact us, etc. So it's less about resumes, more about profiles and bios. But I want to go ahead and show you what the advanced settings are. Now the first thing that I did in order to get it to look like this is I just changed or customized the, the theme. To do that, you can go to, uh, look and feel right below setup. So on the left-hand side in the home page of your Custom Search Engine, click on Look and Feel, and I like to use the Google hosted. The reason for Google hosted is that when I use Google hosted, then the logo is displayed. To be clear, it's the logo, whatever logo that you want can be displayed. If not, the logo won't be displayed. It'll look like what you see here in the, in the test window. So that's really the only reason. I also like to customize it so that when someone clicks on a result, it opens in a new window, meaning that the custom search engine always stays open behind the scenes because, you know, folks close out and then they forget that they— if they were on the search engine, they forget that they also closed out the search engine. This way, if they close the results window, they'll eventually— they'll basically end up back in the custom search engine. So that's kind of what I'm looking for here. The next thing you'll see is themes. Do not click on themes if you want to customize the theme. When you choose one of these, it overrides whatever customization you make, so skip past this and go directly to Customize. And here is where you can change pretty much everything about the way this looks, not only when you land on the search, but also when you execute a search. You can customize the font. There's only a few choices, many of these are familiar, as I'm sure you can, you can recognize. But you know, you can get a little bit creative. Roboto is a little different than, than most, and so on. You can also change the border color of the box and the background color of the box. So essentially the, um, the color that's around the search box and then the border that's around that. Then you can upload a logo. Actually, you don't upload it, you just point to a location on the web. So you have to have this logo somewhere where it will be permanently sitting. So, you know, upload it to a website or just use a logo that's already on your website, for example, and you can create a link for that logo. So when people click on the logo, it will open that window. So of course you can have that, you know, go to your, your company page or your blog or whatever you want. You can change the size, but if your logo is sized correctly, you may not need to do that. Then you have the search box itself. That's essentially the piece that says enhanced by Google there, and you really can only change the border color. To give you an idea, we could, we could make the border color yellow or gray or pretty much, you know, basically whatever you want, essentially, you know, maybe give it a nice little extra dimension that looks a little bit like it's got more depth. Then we have the search button. That's the little magnifying thing. You can change the border, the background, and the color of the magnifying glass. The default is white. Then you have refinements. So these are the tabs that come across the top. To do that, we'll have to do a search for Shelley or whatever, and then you can see the refinements. So as you switch, you know, to each of these— docs, team, etc.— you can have these be any, any color that you want. You can change the background image or the foreground image of the ones that are selected, and so on. And then you move on to the results. Results can be customized. As you can see here, I have it so that it sort of shades it a darker color. And really, I did this just for demonstration purposes. I can see how this would probably be a little bit hard to read or get used to, but I'm sharing with you how you can customize it, so I thought it would be pretty obvious to show you that. So you can change how the background looks as well as how the ones that are being highlighted look, and you can also see that the background has a border that's different when it's being highlighted and when it's not, that also changes, as does the color of the text and the color that you hover over a text. Likewise, I probably should have changed this too, the URL underneath, that's another customization. Which I'll share with you in just a second, but here you can see you're modifying the border and everything else on the results. The title is where you customize the color of the text and what happens when you hover over it. And the result URL here, this is what I mentioned. You can choose to actually show the full URL, the entire URL, or only show the breadcrumb, which is like the little titles. or you can even just show the domain only and not the whole thing. I want to see all of it because I also like to learn from where some of the content is coming from and maybe even add to my custom search engine. So I kind of want to get the full information, but if you're not interested in that, you might want to choose breadcrumbs. And then, um, I chose red. That's probably a really bad color, so let me see if I can maybe make this, uh, white or something like that. I don't know if that's going to look any better. You probably don't realize this, but I am completely colorblind, so sometimes things that look really good to me in high contrast, like for example this, may not look that good to you. Anyway, moving on. So then we also have the result snippet, which is the summary that shows up under the result. I pretty much just left that as whatever the default was, which is kind of a nice-looking, you know, darker color that shows up well. Now we have promotion. So promotion is two things. You can create your own promotions, so you can actually have like a permanent ad that shows up on your own searches. And you can also, you know, have Google Ads show up, but you can change how that looks. I wanted to show you a little trick that I do if you want to actually eliminate the promotions. You technically can do that if you're on a nonprofit account, but if you're on a regular free account, um, the promotions cannot be eliminated. However, if you change the border color, background color, title, you visited and unvisited, and the promotion URL and the snippet to all the same color, it's basically invisible because it just shows up as a, um, you know, just color of the same background, so it fades away. Obviously don't do this if you intend to have a promotion that, you know, is promoting your company or your services or whatever. you're gonna wanna make the promotion a little bit different so that it stands out. The last look and feel customization is thumbnails, and basically I just turned this to on, which shows thumbnails for, um, search results, which is these, these little, uh, images here. This is pretty useful for like profiles, uh, LinkedIn, Facebook, et cetera, where you start to see the headshots. And I like that you can turn that off by just sliding the dial back. To off. Next, we have the advanced features. So now we're going to get into search features. Back to the left here, clicking on search features, all the way up on the right-hand side past refinements and synonyms, you'll see advanced. There's a number of things that we can tweak here. I'll start with result sorting, which you can turn on or off. You want to turn that on so that you can rank results in a way that is not the default. So what does that mean? That means that you can rank them by, for example, date. When you do that, your results are sorted by, um, the date, and/or you can also add relevance, which then gives you the newest, theoretically the newest results for first in your list, or you can turn that off and just have them be the most relevant according to Google. Keep in mind, relevant to Google does not necessarily mean relevant to you. That's it for results sorting. It starts getting a lot more interesting when you do web search settings. The refinement style is whether or not you want to have links here or tabs. Tabs changes the UI a little bit. So if we do that now and I change it to tabs, I'll have to refresh and search again. It's not going to change very much. It would have changed more if I hadn't actually customized the UI, but you would actually see tabs kind of like what's up on top of advanced here. Results browsing history— I like to enable this because then I like to be able to, as a user, go back in my history and see what searches I've done. You can even search your history to go back in time. If you had a search technique that worked really well, you can recall it, or if you had a result that you wanted to look for again, it helps. If you disable this, then there is no search history for the user. This is, of course, the user's search history. Structured data, if you enable that, is going to show the labels and other pieces of structured data underneath. It's a slight change. If you already have labels showing here, then it's going to make a little bit more difference, but it's not a huge, huge deal. The no result string, this is what you would put if it doesn't find anything. So if you did a search for, um, I don't know, some kind of gooblygook, or, you know, search the broad, nothing, the default is just to have no results. But you can make this say, "Sorry, I didn't find anything. Try again," or, you know, "Try different keywords," or something like that. You can see how that immediately changes the, um, message that you get. Let's see if it took— there you go, shows up right there. Then we have the link target. This is whether or not the, um, the link target for links that are embedded in search results goes to a different place. You can— it— I don't really change that, but you can have it be in, you know, another window, etc. I'm already— I already set this up to open in a new window anyways. So when I click on a result, let's see. Oh, the definition of Shelly. Oh look, here's my LinkedIn profile. So when I click on this, it should be— oh, it didn't open a new window. Okay, I'll have to go back and fix that. It should be opening in a new window. Um, that's what I put down as a setting, so I'll go back and fix that. Then you have query addition. This is where you would add a universal parameter that would apply to every search. Be careful though, because this will apply to every search. So if you added here something like resume, then your results will always include the word resume no matter what, no matter which tab you use, no matter which, well, actually let's try it. Go ahead and save it, and then we'll put in here engineer, and now you'll see that it's applying the word resume. Well, you may not actually notice it because it doesn't highlight it, but it does significantly change the results because it's applying that keyword behind the scenes. This only works with when you really want to narrow your search down to a particular keyword or a search phrase. Could be also a statement, a logical disjunction, an or statement as well. And then with query parameters here, it just sets aside the name that goes into the result URL. Again, this is for my own use. I'm not using this for marketing, so I don't I'm also going to remove resume here so I get back to my regular results. That's it for web settings. So I usually turn on the tab, I enable browsing history, and I enable structured results, and pretty much don't really mess with the rest. With web search restricts, you can start changing the type of results that you get. Here's where you can customize your search engine to only include a a particular language. So if you are doing sourcing all over the world, don't mess with that. If you're doing sourcing in a different country where English is not the main language, highly recommend that you could do this because then you'll be getting results from, you know, that language. But you can also just eliminate all other content that is not English by turning this on. And you can also change the result size, but there's a limit. You can only go up to 20. The standard is 10. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. And then so it'll be, you know, 10 pages at a time, but you can actually double that. I wish you could do, you know, 100. It's not— no such luck though. However, at least now when you do a search, you'll have twice as many. Refresh. Here we go. It should be 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, etc. By the way, also you saw it had 10 pages of results. Now it only has 5 pages of results because I've doubled the amount of results per page. Sorting here is also, um, you can do sorting by date or relevance, and that's separate than the other sorting. Frankly, I basically, I just do it here is what I usually do. I sort by date because I like to see the fresher, the more fresh results coming up. Site searches, if you're using this as a search engine for a particular website where you're only searching that website, like your company website or something, I very rarely use it. And then here's extra query terms that would use the logical disjunction OR. This is quite frankly a better way to do something like resume if you wanted to do it. So you could do resume, uh, you don't need to put in the OR, just the comma, resume, CV, CV, vitae, vita, profile, I can't type today, bio, about us, about me, our team, our staff, our people, and so on. I'm not gonna go crazy with it. I'll show you one last thing here and then we'll take a look at what happened when I added those query terms. This is the filter. Normally when you're searching on Google, you can, on any Google search, You can append the filter modification to the URL or inject it to the URL. So for example, if you were to do a search for electrical engineer and then certified, just a quick search, at the end of the URL all the way here, and this is going to be pretty small, but if you can see up on the top of the screen, you would be able to append and filter equals 0, which turns off the site compression. That means that you won't get just one URL per website, even if there's multiple search results that match in that URL. So when you turn this off, you've turned off that, that in the bottom of your search results where it says We can omit the search with the omitted result— we can repeat the search with the omitted results included. You won't see that anymore because you've essentially turned that off by adding the filter. Well, the good news is you don't have to add it every time you do a search. When you use a custom search engine, you just turn this on to— you can either turn it on or turn it off, so you can control the setting. So filter equals false would make it so that there is no site compression. Now let me show you what's happened so far with all of these restricts. Let's reload, and I'm going to add electrical engineer. Now you can see a lot fewer results. I think it was in the millions before. This is because I am now restricting it to pages that have any one of these terms in them, not just resume, but all of the other ones as well. You can see I'm getting CVs, et cetera. But this does sometimes get a little confused. I said "our people" and it found "our people" but not close together. When you see that happening, just enclose that in quotation marks. So "our people" would be in quotation marks. You do not need to have the logical disjunction "or," but you do need to have quotations when you intend for these to be phrases. Although it's supposed to separate them with commas, this sometimes happens. and then of course the other thing that you see here, it's now sorted by relevance. You can change that to date because we set that up before, um, although it shouldn't change the results because I've already forced it to sort by date. So I don't know why they do that. They give you the choice here, but then you already— I guess you, you force it by default and then the user can change it. That makes more sense. I guess that's why they do it. So anyway, Let's save that, and we go to the last one, which is Image Search Settings. This is if you did turn on Image Settings, and that would be in your setup— sorry, Image Search— and that would be in your setup. If you did not turn on Image Search here, Image Search Settings would basically be, uh, well, really not important at all. But we do have it turned on, so we'll go back to Search Features, Advanced, and image search settings. Here again, you can specify a language. You can also expand the number of results, and this is separate because this is the image search. You can also sort by date, and you can also add extra query terms. Again, different than the other one. And you can also turn off the filter. The one last thing here is if you want to default to image search. This is if you want this to be, say for example, a headshot search. Then you would enable that. But when you enable that, it will go to image search first, and then you'll have to choose web. Right now, if we click on image, it goes to that, but that would change it so that it would go there by default. So I usually don't do that. Now that we have done that, uh, done those changes on image search, you can see that it's, you know, well, it's supposed to come up with 40, uh, sorry, 20, 1, 2, 3, Yep, it's got 20, but unfortunately it still doesn't apply the headshots, so it's not quite the same. This is really more useful for those types of photos that we talked about during the image search, um, Shelly's Alley episode where we did the groups left to right, top row, etc. That's what this would be really useful for. To do a headshot image search, you're going to need to go to the Google Advanced out in the open web. you know, or you'll have to get way more technical than what this course is going to cover. So that's pretty much it for the advanced. In the setup, there's one tab called advanced that is not the same. That's a different advanced. That's advanced for setup, and that would be where you would upload or download the schema or the XML files. These are the, the guts or the, the tags or the skeleton of how your search engine is designed. So what you could do is you could download it as a backup. You can download the setup, the configuration file for your custom search engine, keep it safe, and then you can play with your existing search engine. And if anything gets messed up, you can always upload your backup file and essentially reset the search engine. So that's pretty much the, you know, the functionality of that. You can also download it if you're going to move your search engine to another account, or if you've designed a search engine and you want to give it to a client and want them to have it in their account, etc. These are all reasons why you would download it. By the way, you actually can, you can manipulate that file directly using a text editor if you, you know, if you want to start messing with that. The a little bit more advanced than what we want to cover here, but that's actually, um, let's call it the super advanced course. That allows you to do some extra, um, things with the annotations. They're called annotations that you couldn't do with the advanced settings. But while we're here under setup, there's one other thing, and that is sharing the search engine. If you go to users here, you can add someone else or other people that would be able to manage and edit the settings. Anyone can access the search engine right now. You can go to this and start searching, but only people that you've invited, when they're logged into their account, could come into the look and feel and the search features and edit it. So this is how you would share it with your team members. The one limitation is that they have to have a Google or Gmail account. So it's either a Gmail or it's a Google Apps, could be Google Apps for Business, etc. and then you would add them as administrators. If you add them as an owner, then they have the same rights as you do, which that would make sense if you were transferring ownership. But if you make someone else an owner, they can then make you not an owner. So they could, you know, kick you off. So if you intend to keep it, then you might wanna add an administrator that would be your, you know, collaborator, someone that would work with you in the search engine. You can customize the ads. I don't use it for that, and because I have a nonprofit version, I'm not required to. If you have a regular version, because you don't have, you know, you don't have the benefit of owning a nonprofit, then you basically are forced to show ads, and that's where the promotions tab that I was telling you about shows up. See, I don't have ads, so promotions don't show up, but on yours they would, and if you do that little hack with making them all the same color, they would sort of fade away if you want. Or you can also have an AdSense account and make money off of your own ads. So that's pretty much it. The only other thing I can share with you is the statistics, which shows you how often and how many queries people are doing on your search engine. This is kind of neat. It also tells you what the queries were as well. You can click on them and go to the query results. You can also embed this as a kind of like a zeitgeist on your website that says popular queries from our website. Again, if you're doing this as a site search. What's neat about this is it shows you, you know, basically what's going on with your search so you can better help your users tweak it. But if this is really just for you and your team, there's not going to be a whole lot of benefit here. The audit log is where you can reverse any changes that might have taken place, or you can see any changes that have happened. This really only applies when you have more than one administrator, which I don't right now. So that is it. At the very, very beginning when we first launched the series, I talked a little bit about what goes in the search engine keywords. This is not going to affect your search results, it's only going to affect the ranking and you can add words here that would elevate the ranking of the types of content that you want to see, but it doesn't do anything towards filtering. The other thing that you can change here that would result in a massive change would be the region, which would limit it geographically to a region, and the language, which would limit it geographically to a language, but also whether or not you choose to search the entire web. This is perhaps the biggest change that you could make. If you search the entire web, it's going to give preference to all of your websites, but if you turn that off, it will only search the websites that are specifically included in here. You can do that, turn this off, and have websites that are domains like.com and only search those. That's one way to go about it. So just be careful if you search this, search the open web, that you have refinements and synonyms, otherwise there's really very little benefit to having the custom search engine. So there you have it. Those are all of the advanced settings that you can play around with, and hope you've enjoyed Shelley's Alley this Friday. For our next episode, we're going to talk about what you see at the very bottom here, which is the Knowledge Graph and schema.org ramifications. There's also a way to do this inside of the refinements, so you can apply it to your whole search engine or you can apply them specifically to refinements. We'll take a look at both of those, what they do and what they're good for, and I'll show you a couple of examples of search engines that are specifically just knowledge graph and/or schema searches where they don't have URL or synonyms or any of that, so you can see the power of what you can do with this. All right, everybody, so thank you very much for joining us today. I hope to see you again here soon. Take care. Bye-bye.