Look Ma, My Own Search Engine!

It’s always great to help a friend.  A friend of mine, a diver, wanted a specialized search engine for his website focused on diving.  At around the same time, an engineer at Yahoo! built a prototype that made building specialized search engines a snap.  Now, whether you have a blog or website about diving, gaming, crafting, or anything in between you can create a search engine tailored for your users. 

With Yahoo! Search Builder you can create a custom Web search engine by selecting a set of trusted sites to search across or you can tune the search algorithm to the topic of your choice.  Beyond Web search, Search Builder includes Site search and News search.

Then generate the code you’ll need to add your search engine to your site.  You also have control over the look and feel of the search box and search results page. Voila! Instant search engine!

Managing your search engine
We’ve created a basic suite of tools to help you understand your search traffic.  With the popular search module, you’ll discover hot searches your users are interested in. With user and traffic reports, you’ll be able to monitor the growth of your search engine.

We look forward to your comments and feedback. Let us know what new features you would like us to add. 

In the meantime, check out these cool search engines on diving and gaming.  Try searching for “caves” on the diving search engine and you’ll find great spots for cave diving. Similarly, try “NFL” on the gaming search engine and you’ll find the new NFL game.

—Lingxian Ding, Yahoo! Search

The article was originally posted on the Yahoo! Search Blog