When Google announced their Custom Search tools, I was really excited because this is one thing that I thought has been needed in my hobby niche of railroads and railfanning. I maintain Dogcaught which is a blog-format site devoted to railroading and railroad photography in the Pacific Northwest.
The result is the Dogcaught Railroad Search Engine which features a hand-selected list of sites included in the index. It’s powered by Google, so this is a subset of what a full Google search would return. Of course the advantage is that spam sites aren’t included or other sites which might be peripherally related to the topic, but not likely to be of use for someone doing a narrower search.
From a technical standpoint, setting it up was fairly easy. The Google site creates an HTML snipped you plop into your webpage code. I did mine as a WordPress Page. You can either have the search results returned on an HTML page on your site, or on a Google page featuring your logo, name, and just your results.
As an AdSense publisher, you can tie it to your AdSense account so that revenue from advertisements on the search results is shared.
It’s been a smooth process and it seems to have been well-received by the railfan community.
