Friday, August 8, 2008

Google Custom Search

You may have noticed the Google Custom Search thing on the right. You may have wondered if it was different than any other kind of search, Google or otherwise. Here's the scoop:

If you're anything like me you'll be reading an article and come across something that you want to know more about, either to fact check or for mere curiosity's sake. Let's say you're halfway through one of my posts and suddenly you want to look up information for, I don't know, Neil Diamond. Pop 'er in the custom search and it'll open up a new window (so you won't lose your place in the original post) full of legit search results. "Neil Diamond" yields results from Last.fm and Wikipedia (not to mention NeilDiamond.com) and all those good relevant sites.

But say you want information on The Turtles. Holy cow, there must be a zillion different turtles populating the internet! Put them in the search anyway. POW... Wikipedia, ClassicBands.com, "Happy Together" on Youtube, etc. The search has been tweaked to yield music-pertinent results.

Smooth, eh?

Play around with it, use it as a research tool, do whatever.