Forum Moderators: martinibuster
What I mean is you have no control over what is in the index, you can't get it to crawl new content at your demand etc and there is a link out.
So why use it? Why not just add AdSense ads to your internal search engine, which you can control?
If i saw a site with a couple million pages of "content" and no domain level search i would really be turned off by that.
If you have a lot of traffic, which i think you would, an internal search with adsense could pay for a new 64bit alpha server in a weeks time. You can handle 500,000 searches a second while it washes your car and reads the bible backwards. Plus, you can probubly get some kind of tax break (depending on location of course).
[edited by: ChrisKud5 at 6:34 am (utc) on June 19, 2004]
On a site search, i got 1 result returned, with 11 ads on the page.
Now that is what I call degrading a good program into garbage.
Since I'm already using Google SiteSearch, I'd be foolish not to use Google's AdSense search product, which lets me keep a portion of my site's search revenue instead of giving it all to Google.
Good point. I already use site search and I'm going to do the same. Basically I won't expand it any until I know more. Right now I just have it on one page for the convienience of my visitors. If Google sets up a way for me to put a small search box in the side column of my pages I may put it more places.
One thing I don't quite understand is why they might charge a fee for searches with the AdSense version of SiteSearch when they offer GoogleSearch free. Are they going to phase out the free search?
One thing I don't quite understand is why they might charge a fee for searches with the AdSense version of SiteSearch when they offer GoogleSearch free.
Google keeps all the revenues from SiteSearch. With AdSense Search, it splits revenues with publishers, so there's less revenue to cover Google's overhead on high-traffic/low-CTR sites.
Are they going to phase out the free search
They've said nothing about phasing out the free SiteSearch. I don't know why they'd want to phase it out as long as people are using it, since Google gets to keep all the money.
IMPORTANT: AdSenseAdvisor has already told us that any fees will be charged only to sites that generate a very low amount of revenue for their search traffic. And even then, fees will be capped by the amount of revenue earned, so there won't be out-of-pocket expense for any publisher.
Google keeps all the revenues from SiteSearch
Of course. I just wasn't thinking it through.
I just don't see the benefit here, but I am still waiting to see a good model for using this new feature.
Do you think you're not allowed to have both an internal search and an external search? According to Jenstar's summary (and my understanding of what I read in the T&C):
"If you use the search box, you are agreeing that Google provides the only internet-based search service on your site. This would prohibit sites from carrying other search result ads from sources other than Google on any domain they use the search box on."
Nothing about your own internal search there.
So why not two search boxes? "Search our site" followed by "Search the web"? (And even having the Google search box appear on the internal search results.) My thinking is, "If they're going to leave my site anyway, why not make money from it?"
The SiteSearch is currently placed on a website that have educational content and revenues are low, so we don't really want to push those sites to be to commercial.
If a user searches with SiteSearch and can't find results on our site but clicks on the ads of the SiteSearch Results we will make some money and that's good.
If the user left our site and we didn't made any money that is ok, as long the user found what he/she was looking for even if that means he/she found results via Google.
As G also send us free traffic, I don't mind giving them free exposure on our websites. Even with a high CTR and low EPC on the search results we still get a large number of users per month from the Google index.
No need to go for another upgrade with one more box.
