09-10-2007, 11:45 AM
Quote:What Is a Custom Search Engine?
A custom search engine (CSE) tells Google which sites to search and which to avoid when dealing with a search query. This makes it much easier to get specific, guided answers to questions about a specific subject area. If you create a CSE you can use your expertise in a subject to control where Google looks for information about that topic. And you may even make some money in the process, because the custom search engine returns AdSense advertisements with each set of results. If you have an AdSense account, then the revenue from those advertisements can go to you. Don't get too excited, you'll probably get less than a few dollars a month from AdSense unless your search engine gets really successful.
You can tune this list of sites over time, adding and removing sites from the list. This makes it easy to improve the results based on the queries entered by people who are using your custom search engine...
full article: http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2007/...gines.html