Websearch - It's driving me insane!

[PeteM]

Every time I edit the colour pallette the language, country and search boxes are reset to default.

[RonPK]

My overall opinion is that this version of WebSearch is a beta, and that G is using us webmasters as beta testers. Reading this board, so many things seem not ready yet, not available yet, not possible yet:

* unclarity about the fees (they have a standard email for that question now)
* HTML code without publisher ID (fixed, all users had to be informed by email)
* impossible to sign out of WebSearch
* search box settings are not being saved
* paranoid rules about not modifying the HTML (though some flexibility seems to be occuring)

Not a well prepared launch, IMHO.

On the positive side, I think it is great service that will prove useful to my visitors.

[ronin]

I think it has the potential to be an excellent service, once they've ironed out the kinks. I'm really looking forward to having it on my site.

It might look better for them in the meantime if they stuck a (Beta) after the title of the product though, I agree.

[The Contractor]

Hope you are not trying to use Opera in your AdSense control panel (I know, went through this last night). Works for viewing reports and that's about where it stops....

[loanuniverse]

You need to use IE to be assured compatibility.

[Visi]

Nope I think he is referring to the point that settings are not saved in the control panel for websearch. You have to reset all the boxes each time you edit.

[loanuniverse]

I know the problem is that whenever you do all the changes to the pallete in other browsers instead of IE, the changes do not get saved.

The problems stopped when I switched to IE.

[PeteM]

I'm experiencing the problems when using IE.

[ChrisKud5]

This product was months out of being introduced.

It was made public way to early, without bugs fixed. The account code was not even in the code for the first day. What a joke.

This product is a liability to use right now. Until payment terms are laid out in english and not legal mumbo jumbo it is a huge liability.

I make good money on internal searches, and i am not about to switch to a product that
1. has very low EPC
2. send traffic away to google.com
3. devalues ads by placing 10 on a page with 1 result
4. promotes the google brandname and not my own
5. has a unknwon fee that can be deducted from earnings.

[europeforvisitors]

So don't use it. It's just another option, not a mandatory feature.

[domramsey]

So don't use it. It's just another option, not a mandatory feature.

That's not really the point. Google have released buggy, untested and largely unusable code into the public arena.

Not only that, but the implemenation itself is a third rate solution to something that could have been an incredibly powerful tool for webmasters.

Compare the way AdSense ads are implemented to Web Search. AdSense is a slick, professional system that works for just about everyone and degrades gracefully, whereas web search forces you to paste broken HTML into your page, produces ugly output and even uglier (over 400 characters long!) URLs.

My guess is the whole system was written by 5 blind monkeys using FrontPage.

[blaze]

Yeah, I never understand how anyone can argue with more options.

I'm sure there is some small percentage of content websites that will profit off of this. We should be glad for them and move on.

Personally, anything (well, almost anything) that makes content websites even slightly more viable, must be a good thing.

Plus, this will force overture/msn's hand. They will compete and this arena will get very very interesting.