So Google’s Custom Search Engine service is now live and I thought I’d give it a go to see how it works and have a bit of fun.
I’ve created a ProBlogger Search Engine which you as ProBlogger readers are welcome to contribute sites to.
There’s a link on that page where you can volunteer to add sites to the search engine (I get to approve you or reject you from what I can tell).
At present it only searches ProBlogger.net but you are welcome to submit sites to it also and hopefully by doing so we’ll create a little search engine out of the blogs of the ProBlogger wider community (keep the sites submitted family friendly please.
To search the ProBlogger Search Engine either go here or enter your search term here.
update: While setting it up is quite easy I have to say that when you allow others to volunteer to participate that it’s rather ‘odd’.
- For starters people can volunteer without giving you any details (name/photo). So you end up approving a nameless faceless person.
- Secondly you don’t get any notification that people have volunteered (I was waiting for a notification only to log in just now and find 20 or so of you had volunteered over the last few hours).
- Thirdly – it seems people can submit any sites they want without your approval once you’ve approved them. To me this seems the wrong way around – if I can’t identify who is who and have to approve people blind then it’d make sense to be able to moderate the sites they submit. I can see this system being abused considerably.
- Lastly they list volunteers horizontally across the home page. When you have 20 volunteers this means you need to scroll horizontally to see them all. I can’t imagine what it’ll look like in the morning when another 50 of you have applied to join in! It all seems very unlike Google in terms of design – ie their homepage is very minimalistic!
Update II: Ok – it’s the next morning and I’ve just approved another 50 or so volunteers. there should be 70+ listed on the home page but they seem to have limited what they show to 20 (or is 20 the limit and all others are not accepted?)
Another reflection – it takes a long time to manually approve 50 volunteers – where’s the ‘approve all volunteers’ button?
Lastly – has anyone submitted any sites? To this point the only sites included are the ones I manually added….
