A Google AdSense CSE (Custom Search Engine) can be a great way to earn revenue from your Website, and at the same time gives your visitors a way to search your own Website, or a number of Websites. You can also use it to create a search engine like Web Design Tuts’ Tutorial Search Engine, which includes about 20 different sites all relating to design tutorials.

Creating a Google CSE is very simple, but then again anything can be simple once you know how. Here is a run-down on how to do it:

  1. Go to the Google AdSense homepage (http://www.google.com/adsense/home) and log in. (You can use your standard Google account)
  2. Once you are logged-in, click on AdSense Setup tab in the top navigation bar.AdSense Setup
  3. On the next page, click AdSense for Search, as shown below.AdSense - Get Ads
  4. On this page, the basic configuration for the CSE starts. The following few points will describe each section of the config page:
    • Search Type – If you only want your own site included in the search results, then select “Only sites I select”. If you want a Web search for your site, select “The entire Web”.
    • Selected Sites – If you selected “Only sites I select” in the previous option, then this is the place where you enter the URLs of the sites you wish to include in the search results. You can define one site only (i.e. your own), or you can enter many different sites.
    • Optional Keywords – Here you can define any keywords which relate to the sites you selected to fine-tune the search results.
  5. Most of the next set of options are safe to leave as they are, so I’ll skip these for now. Click Continue at the bottom of the page when you are ready to continue.
  6. On the next section, you can customize the look of the search box. There isn’t much describing needed here as Google do a good job of this with their live preview. So when you are finished tweaking your search box, click Continue.
  7. The next section is where you customize the look of the results page. The next few sections describe the features of this page:
    • Open results within my own site – This option is chosen by default. With this selected, you can enter the URL of where you will display the search results. This can be the same as the page with the search box if you want. You can also select where you wish to have the Google Advertisements displayed (in relation to the search results), using the “Ad Location” setting.
    • Open results on Google in a new window - If this option is chosen, a new browser window is opened once someone clicks the Search button in your search form. As you can see, selecting this radio button opens new configuration options. This option allows you to define a logo which will appear on the top or on the left of the Google search box. You can also define a URL that you will be brought to if you click on the logo.
    • Open results on Google in the same window – This option is just about the same as the “Open results on Google in a new window” option. The open differece is that, when someone clicks the Search button on your search form, a new browser window is opened with the search results.
  8. You can also select the colours you would like the results page to use here. When you are finished, again click Continue.
  9. The last thing to do is to make sure you understand Google’s CSE Terms of Service and to give your search engine a name. Once you’ve got that done, click continue and you can get your code for adding it to a Web page.

There is one more thing to cover when it comes to Google CSEs. Once you have created your search engine, there are further configuration options available to you. Go to the AdSense Setup tab like before, and this time click “Manage Ads”. Here you will find all the AdSense units you have created. Once you have found your search engine, click “Edit settings” on the right of the page. When the page loads, click “View more advanced search features” in the paragraph under the “AdSense for Search” heading.You can explore these options for yourself now, so have fun!