Wow, Matt notes that unlike offerings by Yahoo and LIVE, Google’s going to allow you to include thousands of URLs in a customized search specialized for your own websites.
This is exactly what I was looking for in travel as it allows you toa create a great regionally targeted search engine using “known and trusted” URLs combined with Google’s monster search power. They’ll also be sharing revenues from the searches though historically that’s been too small amount with the generic customized search (which they’ve had for some time).
Good going Google! Yahoo and MSN – copy this approach NOW!
Yahoo really should have come up with this “including many URLs” approach because it’ll encourage the community to pick trusted URLs to include in their searches, and Yahoo, unlike Google, would be comfortable using that human feedback. It’s spammable, sure, but a great spam fighting tool in that the power of the whole community is unleashed in the selection process.
Hey! I built one for Oregon Travel and will upgrade California Travel with more good sites soon. This has a lot of potential if Google uses the community input to help weed out crappy sites and upgrade unknown sites, though they tend to avoid this type of human (and therefore spammable) input. Yahoo is more comfortable with that approach so I hope they are taking advantage of it via the Rollyo and Yahoo custom search user inputs.
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Joe Duck 