Introduction to advanced Custom Search Engine Management

A Custom Search Engine consists of an XML specification of the engine and a set of annotations. You can use the wizard for creating a Custom Search Engine (and not bother with any XML). However, there are some features that are not yet available through the form based interface. To access these features, you need to specify your Custom Search Engine using XML.

Similarly, you can add sites (or url patterns) one at a time to your Custom Search Engine in the control panel of your Custom Search Engine or with the Google Marker. If you would like to add a large group of websites to a search engine, all at once, you can also upload files with a list of annotations using one of the file formats described in this document.

Another reason for uploading annotations in one of these file formats is that you can also associate scores with url patterns, a feature not currently available in the control panel or the Google Marker. These scores can be used to control the ranking of search results.

Finally, if you have a list of sites, already lying around, in a format such as OPML, you might want to upload the OPML file, rather than type in each url.

Get started with advanced Custom Search Engines

• Annotation files - Upload OPML, TSV and XML annotation files to your search engine. Learn about the XML format for annotations.


• CSE XML format - Learn about how to express your CSE in XML format.


• Linked CSEs - Learn about hosting the CSE specification on your site.