Email from AdSense promoting Custom Search Elements

Raises some questions.

[dataguy]

I just received an email from the Google AdSense team promoting Custom Search Elements. I make a few bucks a day using Google Custom Search Engine on my site, so I need to fully check them out. It appears that it's a way to make the search box and button match your web site.

Something that really jumps out at me is that the examples of sites using these elements #1 aren't branded with the Google logo, and #2 (more importantly for me) are links the query strings which contain the search terms, which are filled in when you click the links and arrive at the search page.

I thought both of these were against the CSE terms of use. Isn't displaying the search phrase in the search box considered pre-filling it?

This would require modifying the HTML code from Google, which I thought was also not allowed. If we were allowed to pre-fill the search box like this, it would make a much better experience for my users, and I know I could make significantly more money from it.

What do you think?

[jetteroheller]

First, I would like to have an Okay from Google, that I can integrate the search box javascript branding code into my own javascript to reduce the number of calls to resouces and speed up load time of my site.

Load time seems to be now a big theme at Google, so it would be nice
to have every possibilty to deal with the problem.

When I could integrate into my Javascript

my own javascript
Google analytics
code for searchbox

I would have in one compressed gun zip delivered javascript
3 different JS.

[bgd2006]

I'm playing around with this and I like the "drop down" results feature as they display on same page over whatever content is right below the search box. I does increase the number of calls to resources though and I can't seem to get ads to display even though they do in the example page and I've enabled access to AdSense for Google Coop.