If you want to gather information regarding how to create your own search engine for a website or blog, you have reached the right place. Let us talk in detail about custom Google search and how to use it with the help of APIs. By creating your own Custom Search, you can either enable search over one individual website or you can search about one topic from various related sites.
Benefits of Google Custom Search
Once you get a custom Google Search API, you get access to essential advantages like:
- Image search through website
- Customised search engines that browse through specified pages or websites
- Leveraging structured data
- Linking Search Engine with Adsense account if you want to earn out of ads being clicked by viewers while staying on your page.
These and many similar uses make custom Google Search API a pre-requisite for high-performing websites.
How to get a custom Google Search API?
- Identifying application with API key: You need to have an API key first of all. It is like a key to identifying your client to Google. You can embed this key in URLs and you don’t need any kind of encoding as it is safe. JSON format is easy-to-read and you can now append to all related URLs.
- Develop a custom search engine ID: In order to move ahead with Google Search API, you must create a search engine with the Control Panel. This ID will be used to specify which particular custom search engine you wish to use while performing the search.
- Use the ‘q’ search query parameter which specifies your search further.
Improving performance with APIs
You can always work on particular niches that enhance performance of your application. For example, if you try to reduce the bandwidth of each request, your network costs are drastically reduced. Your API calls can further perform better if you work with partial resources. This means you would be requesting only that particular portion of data in which you are interested. Thus, you would be totally avoiding unnecessary fields. Other resources like network, memory and CPU perform more efficiently.
APIs that support certain query parameters like data pagination, are capable of reducing the result size to manageable chunks, giving maximum performance gains.
Custom Search Site Restricted API (JSON)
If you wish to restrict your search results to very few websites (ten or below), you can go for an API which has no daily query limit. In the Control panel, you have to select ten or fewer sites in the ‘Sites to search’ section. ‘Search the entire web’ should be off.
Getting a custom Google Search API is now easier, thanks to Google Search APIs which offer multiple parameters to make your search as specific as you can. You can use available API playgrounds for demo trials by simulating a search. Check for fast SERP scrapers which are high performing and offer maximum scalability.
