I've been playing around with Google Co-Op, Google's new customized search engine beta. With Co-Op, anyone can create a highly customized, topic-specific search engine and then deploy that engine into virtually any web page they publish. Using this new tool, I've been able to build a custom Google search engine that returns results from the sites I specify only - for my purposes, I've created an engine that searches my blog and 40 or so other marketing blogs from my Blogroll. It's pretty cool and really enhances the relevancy of the results (no more extraneous links to off-target pages.) Check it out:
Personalization (in all its forms) is powerful - and making search a more relevant utility for people with highly specialized interests is a smart thing. For me, having an easy way to search my favorite sites is proving to be an asset in both my day job and my blog-tracking.
It will be interesting to see if this takes off. It does take a bit of work to set up the original search, but once you've done it the rest is a piece of cake.
Play around and let me know what you think.
