Appy Friday! Under Control with Custom Search Engines

Create a Custom Search Engine

I don’t always want my younger students to have full access to the internet for their research, but I want them to have an easy way to access websites that I as the teacher have reviewed and approved. I discovered a way to accomplish this by setting up a Custom Search Engine and sharing the link to the engine with my students. All my Custom Search Engines are saved using my Google account.

To create a Custom Search Engine from scratch, you'll need to name your search and add some sites to search. Here’s what to do.

Create a new search engine:

1. On the Google Custom Search home page, click New search engine. 2. In the Sites to search section, add the pages you want to include in your search engine. You can include any sites you want, not just sites you own. You can include site URLs or page URLs, and you can also get fancy and use URL patterns. 3. The name of your search engine will be automatically generated based on the URLs you select. You can change this name at any time. 4. Select the language of your search engine. This defines the language of the buttons and other design elements of your search engine, but doesn't affect the actual search results. 5. Click Create. 6.To add your search engine to your site, click Get Code on the next page. Copy the code and paste it into your site wherever you want your Custom Search Engine to appear.

If you don’t want to embed your Custom Search Engine in a site, you can copy the public URL and give students access to that via a URL shortener such as goo.gl.

See an example of a third grade Custom Search Engine used by students to research information and find images of desert biomes. There are four websites in this custom search engine. http://goo.gl/eUl0WG

Give it a try; I think you’ll love that your students can easily access enough information approved by the teacher, without the distractions and confusions that often come with “surfing” the web.

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