Google Custom Search Engine: Good Idea?

[KempRugeLawGroup]

I created a Google Custom Search Engine for our site, but I"m not sure implementing it is a good idea. When I tested it with the public URL, I noticed that ads show up on the search engine that could potentially move visitors away from our site to our competitors.

Has anyone had success with implementing a Google Custom Search Engine? Do the pros outweigh the cons?

Thanks,

Ruben

[LoganRay]

Ruben,

In my experience, it's a decent low-budget site search tool. However, it does have a few hangups. As you mentioned, it shows ads unless you pay for a higher tier of subscription. Also, the aesthetics of it are also somewhat limited. It's difficult to make it look good within the frame of the rest of your site.

And last, but most importantly, Google custom site search is exactly the same set of pages that are indexed for regular Google searches. While this isn't a problem for most, there are instances (for larger sites specifically) where you'd want to noindex or disallow certain types of content to not show in the SERPs, but you would want that content to be accessible via internal search. Think of a University site for example: TONS of URLs on a college's website, whether it's events or course catalogs, a lot of this doesn't need to be shown in SERPs. If you're using Google custom search, these same sets of pages will also be inaccessible there.

Hope that helps!