Adding Site-Flavored Google Search

Finally, Google has a new way to add search to your website, in the form of Site-Flavored Google Search. This customizes the search results based on your site's content. All you have to do is fill out a profile of your site, and then Google generates the appropriate HTML code. When visitors search from your site using this new search box, they'll have the option to fine-tune the results based on the content profile you created.

To add Site-Flavored Google Search to your web page, follow these steps:

1.	Go to www.google.com/services/siteflavored.html and click the Start Here to Customize Google for Your Site link.
2.	When the next page appears, as shown in Figure 39.7, you can enter your website URL and click the Get Profile button to have Google automatically try to divine a profile for your site. (This doesn't always work, however.) Figure 39.7. Creating a site-flavored Google search. [View full size image]
3.	Instead, you may need to click through the categories listed (and one or more of the resulting subcategories) to create your profile.
4.	When you're done creating your profile, click the Generate HTML button.
5.	Google now generates a batch of HTML code. Copy this code, and then paste it into the code for your web page where you want the search box to appear.

When you insert this code, it creates a custom search box like the one shown in Figure 39.8. When a visitor uses this box to conduct a search, it generates a list of results "flavored" by the content selected in your site profile. The most relevant sites, based on the content profile, are listed at the top of the search results.

Figure 39.8. The Site-Flavored Google Search box.

[View full size image]