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A Complete Guide to Google Programmable Search Engines

Irina Shamaeva, David Michael Galley

• Publisher: Chapman and Hall/CRC
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000332599
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Computer Science

Google's Programmable Search Engines (PSEs, previously called Custom Search Engines) provide search opportunities that are unavailable with any other tool. PSEs have advanced settings and search operators that are not supported by "regular" Google. With PSEs, it is possible to perform filtered searches within parts of the web as if they were databases!

While lots of professionals use existing PSEs to source for talent or with other research goals, few people have experience creating them. Even fewer know about powerful PSE-only search operators. The main reason PSEs are not as popular as they should be is that it is not easy to get educated on PSE creation. There is little information online and no books (other than this one) on the subject. Even less info is available on the "structured" operators that allow for filtered searches.

The first of its kind, this book hopes to popularize these fun and powerful tools so that many more people can include PSEs in their work.

Key Features:

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• A detailed introduction to creating PSEs, including info absent in Google's help

• 
  
  

• A "hack" for creating PSEs that look for profiles in seconds

• 
  
  

• An introduction to advanced PSE-only search operators allowed to perform filtered searches of parts of the web

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• A "hack" for expanding Google's search limits to 500 terms

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• Use cases, examples, and approaches that would be educational for those doing online research

This book will be of interest to researchers, OSINT specialists, investigative journalists, Competitive Intelligence people, recruiters, and Sourcers, to name a few categories, and to the general public interested in how to search better.

1

Introduction to Google Custom Search Engines (CSEs)

Chapter 1

Simple and Advanced Google Search

BACK IN 2007, OUR AGENCY Brain Gain Recruiting placed a software engineer we found on Google. A few minutes' effort (plus, of course, all the interactions) made us about $25,000. We were quite impressed. We also enjoyed what felt like "treasure hunting" on Google. It was both educational and fun.

Since then, we have been digging deep into Google and using creative search strings to get hard-to-find results.

If you are in the business of finding information, advanced Google is your best friend. Custom Search Engines are an elaborate software layer on top of Google that you can utilize as well.

To understand how CSEs work, you first need to get familiar with Google search and its advanced operators. We have included a section about Google.com search and the advantages of using CSEs vs. searching on Google. They should provide you with some background, but You must run and modify the examples we have provided.

Let us start with two definitions related to Google search.

• Search engine results pages (SERP) are web pages served to users searching for something with a search engine, such as Google. The user enters their search query (often using specific terms and phrases known as keywords), upon which the search engine presents them with a SERP (source: https://www.wordstream.com/serp).
• Search result snippets are the additional context included with each result on the search results page. Google displays them under clickable links to resulting web pages, which it shows along with the page titles. Snippets include blocks from the page text highlighting your search terms in bold font. They may also show specific-to-the-web-page attributes, such as recipe ratings or event dates. They may show the last updated dates for the page. They are an essential tool to help searchers to find what they are looking for. (We picked part of the explanation from this source.)

Simple Google Search

"Google it!" Most people Google simply by entering a few keywords and look to find one "right" piece of information. Google search is optimized to provide one answer to your question. Users nearly always see the desired result as the first or second on the search results page.

In recent years, Google seems increasingly focused on providing a single "best" result for any search. In addition to standard search results, Google shows Knowledge Graph entities (to the right of search results) and Featured Snippets. Featured Snippets are an expanded preview of information from a site Google considers authoritative. They appear above the first search result. We will cover Knowledge Graph entities in more depth later in this book.

Here are some examples of Google providing answers to clear questions. We have provided multiple examples to show the broad scope of queries for which Google would give you "the" answer along with the search results. Click the links to view them. (As time goes, Google's ranking algorithm will get better in semantic search because it is a learning algorithm.)

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