Google AdSense Site Search

Wondering about experiences with it

[calman]

I was wondering if many of you use Google AdSense Site Search?

What have been your experiences with it?

Can you actually make any money from it?

I have just joined AdSense and was wondering if Site Search might be useful. I previously used Atomz for site search (happily for several years I might add), but my site has now outgrown its free program (750 pages).

[europeforvisitors]

It works fine for me. Googlebot crawls my site daily, so new pages get indexed quickly. (Sites that get crawled infrequently might be better off with a different search solution.)

My CTR and eCPM from search are extremely high--amazingly so at times. Unfortunately, few of my readers use search, so total revenues from search average less than 0.5% of what I earn from content ads. Still, as long as I feel the need to provide internal search for readers who want it, I might as well make a few bucks from it while Google does the work.

[benevolent001]

My experience has been good

Its world placing on the website and getting few extra bucks

See if you can place it some where on your website,dont place both search boxes at one time

good luck

[hhayes]

I agree with EFV. I make around 50 cents extra a day using Google search. It was easy to set up and works pretty well, so I'm happy to tack on a bit extra to my AdSense earnings for something I need on my site anyway.

[peewhy]

I get a few dollars extra per day. Initially I didn't want to put it on for fear of losing traffic and revenue.

It pays more per click than AS in some cases.

[elfred]

I put it on my web site because I needed a good site search feature and I didn't want to reinvent the wheel. Few users use it (I hope because the web site is easy to browse :-)), the CTR is around 2.4% and it makes up about 4 to 5 dollars per month :-)

[The Contractor]

I get about 7-10% of daily income from search. It all adds up for the month. Even though it seems they may have started paying a bit more, they still have a ways to go if they really want people to implement it.

If they would allow publishers to make a "template" for a search results page (looking like any other page of your site) with a simple JavaScript tag to "call" the results it would be great. As it is now it looks hideous IMHO. I know they could do it easily enough.

[2PACroatia]

can someone talk more about search feature?

do you make money when someone does the search, or when he does the search..and clicks on the sponsored ads..next to the search results?

what about, when someone searches within your site?

i figure, that you earn money from the clicks to sponsored links?

[The Contractor]

yes, you get paid if someone clicks a sponsored/adwords link in the search results whether they are searching your site or Google.

[nanotopia]

My experience was just okay. It did offer an excellent search for my website, but the payout for clicking on the search results ads were extremely low.

Ultimately, I decided to remove it from my website for two reasons:

1. Barely made any money from it.

2. It's ugly. The ToS don't allow you to modify any part of the code, including layout and such. I could never make it look the way I wanted on my website, so I chucked it.

[TheDonster]

My experience with Search has been pretty good. I had a free service before since I was too lazy to write the code for an internal search. Of course they serve ads but keep the money so why shouldn't it go to the site publisher? I average about $50 to $60 per month on the search side and what's really nice is Google's feature whereby it will ask "Did you mean..." whenever there is a misspelling. Downside to search is what everyone already said, it is just impossible to customize. I emailed Google and they said don't touch it! Really a shame since blended ads are a sucess, why not blended search? What I eventually did was remove the search from all pages and wrote a text link at the bottom of each page to send the user to the search box. At least it cut down on the number of pages with this huge Google search box sticking out like a sore thumb. Give it a try, but leave it at least a couple of weeks before you decide. My first few days were dismal.

[YesMom]

I have many users who site search... and the CTR is great but the EPC is incredibly low... just a penny or 2 per click. I keep it because I need it... and I do get that extra 50 cents a day, but that is less than 1% of my income.

I am thinking of eventually scrapping it for a site search program that will search 2,000 or more pages. Then I would experiment with populating the search box and completely customize the landing page for results.

If someone knows a good program I can purchase and install on an Apache server easily, please sticky me!