Searching the CPU Blog Space

As you might guess, I’m a big fan of web search. Disclosure: I work at Google now, but I’ve always felt that being able to effectively search is really a key skill, whether you’re searching in a library or in an online web-based corpus. And we know that being able to provide your users with easy-to-find information is absolutely essential.

A while back, Google introduced something called “Custom Search Engines” (CSE) – it’s basically a way to make a very simple widget that lets users search a particular piece of the web. Since you get to say which piece of the web gets searched, you can focus in on information that’s very targeted to your users.

URL: http://google.com/coop/cse/

Not long after Google launched CSE, I built one for our Creating Passionate Users blog. Just as a mini-experiment, I put the search tool at the bottom of the blog and wondered if anyone would find it and use it. (Sure, go ahead… you can look down there now. It’s really there.)

All it really does is (in my best techno-geek-speak) is a “site restriction operator over the CPU blog space…”

What that really means is that when you do a search using the widget at the bottom of each CPU posting, that search is limited to just the contents of all the CPU postings and the comments.

So if you really want to find that great blog post Kathy wrote about Icelandic horses, or the one about acrobatic dismounts, or maybe the sexy t-shirts post, all you’ve got to do is scroll to the bottom of the page and find the search box. It’ll look like this:

 

Figure 1: Note this is an IMAGE, the real thing is down below…

 

To use it, just type your search terms in the box on the left (where you see the words “Google Custom Search” in light gray). Hit enter, and, voila.. you’ll find the posts you seek.

If you have a website or run your own blog, you might want to consider adding your own Custom Search Engine to it. It’s really pretty simple - it took me about 3 minutes to make our CPU Custom Search Engine, then another 5 minutes to fit it into the Typepad HTML.

As I mentioned, I dropped the search box onto the bottom of our CPU blog posting page. I know, I know… that’s a terrible place to put it if you’re looking for traffic. But I was really curious how many people read all the way to the bottom of the post and would then use the feature.

Here’s the answer:

 

Figure 2: Statistics of the CPU Custom Search Engine. Uses per day since startup.

As you can see, we’re slowly picking up more and more traffic over time. This is a typical adoption curve for a well-hidden feature. It’s been used a little bit each day. Notice how use typically drops on the weekends. Is that because we tend to post midweek, or are all you readers checking out CPU at work??

Now that we have some experience with it, it might be time to move it up to the top of the page.

Consider adding custom search as a way to quickly and easily increase the overall usability of your web site / blog / whatever… Since it’s now pretty easy, you no longer have any excuse for making your users work to find the information they really want about your product.

Just out of curiosity, now that the secret is out, how many of you noticed the search box down there, and never tried it out?  If not, can you say why?   

And if you have tried it out, did it work for you?

Inquiring minds want to know!  We're experimenting just a bit to see if we can't make CPU an ever-better place to learn the latest and greatest.  Tell us what you think!