If you use wordpress or any of the other Content Management Systems (CMS), you know how shocking the built in search functionality can be. It’s so bad that at times, I find myself using Google to search for articles on my own sites!
So I thought, wouldn’t it be great if I can get Google’s search functionality integrated into my WordPress or any other CMS sites. And after some research and hacking around, I managed to add Google search into my Wollongong Fitness website.
The Wollongong Fitness website has the Google search bar on the top right of the site, similar to the image above. And when you search for something, the results are displayed on the main website’s display. Below is a screenshot of Google’s search result being display on the Wollongong Fitness website.
How to Add Google Search to Your WordPress Website
Below are the instructions on how you too can add Google Search to your wordpress website.
1) Create Your Custom Google Search Engine
You want the Google search toolbar on your website to only display results from your website.
To do this, you will need to custom search engine on Google at http://www.google.com/cse/
At the Google Custom Search Engine page, click on “Create a Custom Search Engine” and follow the instructions.
When specifying the Site for Google to search, I put *.wollongongfitness.com/* this told Google to display all search results from the Wollongong Fitness domain. If your website or blog does not have its own dedicated domain, you might want to specify something like someCommonDomain.com/myBlog/*
Also when selecting the look and feel of the Google custom search, there are three options to choose from, Full-Width, Compact and Two Column. For the Wollongong Fitness I chose the Two Column option as I had the search toolbar separate from the results page.
2) Install the Google Custom Search WordPress Plugin
Go to https://littlehandytips.com/plugins/google-custom-search/ and download the plugin. Then Follow the instructions in there to set it up!
3) Done!
That’s it. Your Website’s search is now powered by Google!
Also you can make money from the advertisements on your Google search results page.
To do this, you will need to have a Google Adsense account and link the Google custom search to the Adsense account!
Hope you found this useful and if you have any questions or suggestions to improve this tutorial, let me know by leaving a comment!
First Post!
Cool plugin, look forward to using it 🙂
I really enjoy what you write on here. I try and check your blog every day so keep up the good posts!
Thanks for this–i have managed to install it on my site
Google’s rise to success was in large part due to a patented algorithm called PageRank that helps rank web pages that match a given search string. When Google was a Stanford research project, it was nicknamed BackRub because the technology checks backlinks to determine a site’s importance.:^
Ciao