Adsense for Search customization

What's legal and what's not?

[lobo235]

I would like to replace the search feature on one of my sites with adsense for search. I need it to fit in a div that's only 172px wide. What can I do to make this work? Am I allowed to change the width of the table that the search box is located in? Also, I want the search to only search my domain and not the entire web. Can I remove the radios for "Web" and "www.my-domain-name.com" and just use a hidden input to make it search my domain?

Any help is appreciated as I am completely new to Adsense for search although I have used adsense for content for a while now.

[ann]

Then don't start out by trying to re-invent the wheel. If you really need to change it then email the adsense support team and ask...changing the code could result in getting booted from adsense.

Ann

[Alioc]

Things like changing the box char width, playing with colors or changing the position of your logo wouldn't be a problem for anyone but keep the functionality as original. Checkbox, dropdown box, whatever you place should serve the same purpose.

[MichaelCrawford]

The adsense search code is HTML 4 transitional. It used presentation tags. It will cause an XHTML 1.0 Strict page to fail to validate.

It's not hard to modify the search markup to validate as XHTML strict though. I emailed adsense support and asked them to support strict markup with CSS and told them I was modifying their markup to make the search on my pages strict/css. They thanked me for the feature suggestion and didn't complain about me monkeying with it.

I haven't looked into it carefully, but I can't see how they could complain about what I did. What probably would get you booted was altering the markup in such a way as to increase your revenue. Making the markup fit with the design of an existing page wouldn't do that.