How To Make Money Online Building Your Own Custom Search Engine

A few years ago, some guy got tired of sifting through all the dreck that was already on the Internet and he decided to devise a system to make it easier to find what you were looking for. Something along the lines of the index in a book. Yeah – an index! That’s it! And when he got done he decided to give it a silly little name like Google and now he’s a bajillionaire. You can do that, too. You probably won’t be able to knock Google off the top of the mountain, but you can make money online building your own custom search engine.

In fact, Google even makes it easy for you to create your own custom search engine by supplying you with all the resources you need – for free. Check out Google Custom Search. A few clicks, copy the script, put it on your website and you’ve got your own custom search engine. If you’re a non-technical blogger like me, it takes about 5 minutes. If you want to get into all that customization stuff – it can take longer. Either way, here’s how it works…

There are several basic customization options you can choose from. First, you get to name your search engine and then you can decide if you want the results to appear on your own site or if you want Google to host it.

After you get through those basic question, that’s when the fun starts. Because you can select exactly which sites you want to appear in your search engine results – including your own. And this is where a lot of site owners are going to get greedy. Yeah, some of your visitors are going to use that Google search bar to find more information. And most of the will have no idea that search bar is your own custom creation. What’s the harm in sending them only to your own sites?

Well, two reasons really. If your own sites are relevant, it’s fine. But if you’re sending them to completely unrelated sites they’re not going to click anyway. And if they do, they’re not going to stick around. More than likely they’ll just think there’s something wrong with the search box and click off the page.

The second reason is because those search results are monetized with Google Adsense and the ads that come up will be relevant to the search results. Again, nobody is going to click on those ads for Dog Food when they originally came to your site looking for information on home mortgages. So you’re shooting yourself in the foot. Your readers are obviously searching for relevant information and those Adsense ads are right there at the top of the search results. Every time they click them you make money.

When you first set up the custom search box you have to enter at least a couple of other sites. But you have two options: You can either choose to have only those sites included in the results, or you can have those sites appear first with other relevant sites to follow. The choice is yours but you need to consider search quality so your readers find what they’re looking for.

When you add a site the only information you enter is the home page URL. The Google bots then scan the site and index all of its pages. (Don’t forget to submit your own sitemap if you haven’t already. You’ll need to make sure you select your own site, too, if you want it to be included in your search engine.)

Now, further along in the settings you also have the option of allowing up to 200 additional admins for your search engine. These admins only have access to the setting that allow adding new sites to the engine – they can’t access your Adsense information or anything else. Of course, this doesn’t mean you’re required to ad additional admins. But think of the marketing potential…

What if you and several like-minded bloggers were to create your own, huge search engine, that included all of your own sites, regardless of the niches involved? And what if you all put that same search engine on all your blogs? You’d be creating your own vast blogging network and keep those readers all inside your own little realm.

And what if you all commented on each other’s blogs and used relevant links to link to each other? And what if you gave each other ad space in your sidebars? And what if…??

If you want to make money online building your own custom search engine you have to get creative. There are already several major search engines ahead of you. But you can use yours to create your own little corner of the market.