There’s a fair buzz going around with the release last week of Google’s Custom Search Engine facility.

It has been possible for some time to place a Google search for a single URL on your site, but now you can create a custom CSE that searches up to 2,000 specified URLs. These can be explicit sites or folders or URLs matched by patterns. Further you can label (tag) each of these with subjects, allowing the user to refine search results accordingly. And you can send the results to a custom page on your site.

We can expect thousands of CSE’s to pop up all over. Here are some likely applications:

• To add full text search to your own site.
• To search a single favourite site using Google rather than the site’s own search engine. Not as dumb as it at first sounds. How many large sites have you visited where the SE is less than satisfactory or even worse than useless for your purposes? Set up a Google CSE for the site. Later you can refine it by listing specific folders on the site or URL patterns and labeling these by subject.
• To search multiple sites in a particular vertical domain. This will be the most popular application, but I suspect most will disappoint. I’ve already noticed that narrowing the domain searched raises unjustified expectations about the quality of the results. Only careful application of the advanced features available will produce a CSE that does the business.

For the time being I’ve knocked up a simple CSE with no advanced features to search all UK law blogs – Blawgle. More will appear on infolaw in due course.