Here on the EMG blog pages there will likely be information about Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing. What about optimization from the other side of that equation? The painful side of the equation where you have been typing in different various combinations of search terms only to toggle between 0 results and 100,000 pages of mail archives none of which have what you are looking for.

Your suffering does not need to be completely in vain. And, more importantly, there is no reason other members of your tech team need to go through it also.

There are several customizable search engines out there, and the following could certainly be adapted for each. I’m going to look at a feature of one of the most popular monopolies search engines in the digital ether … Google customized search.

If I’m working on a product that is built off a stack, often I find myself typing the same keywords into the search over and over and only changing the last couple keywords.

I also find myself noticing the same sites in my search results, some of which don’t have what I am looking for.

• forums without good posters/respondents
• aggregation sites with bad links back to the original source
• sites that require membership/payment to see the answer
• api documentation (if I want to search the API, I’ll do it explicitly because it’s bookmarked. you do have the API bookmarked, right?)

The steps to creating a custom search can be found here:
http://www.google.com/coop/cse/

Note: Many of the options aren’t available during the initial setup wizard. After creating it, you will get more customization options.

The first thing I do is type in those same keywords I use in every search.

Now the fun part. Removing from the search results the sites I don’t want to see. I usually exclude any forums I find consistently have no value. You can also use URL patterns to exclude sites that have certain paths in the name … ( API documentation tends to have /apidocs/ in the URL pattern)

If you find some forums are particularly helpful, you can add them to the included sites and set the search to do the whole web, but emphasize those sites.

Now all of this is pretty useful, but the real power comes after you save this and share it with the other members of your team. Now, everyone working on this project can get the same benefit out of the search that you have. The efficiency committee would be proud!

Emg web developer

Note: I haven’t experimented enough to see if it works better to do one customized search per technology base (PHP, Java, C#, etc) or to make it more targeted (Zend framework, Spring-hibernate, etc).