Google Site Search lets you index pages faster

Google Site Search is giving site owners even more control with a new feature called On-Demand Indexing. Now you can add pages to your site’s search index with literally the push of a button.

As the name implies, Site Search is Google’s search tool for individual web sites. Previously dubbed Google Custom Search, the service relaunched in June with the ability for site owners to customize the search results that users see. In other words, Google isn’t just giving users its general search results, narrowed down to an individual web site. Instead, it’s building a separate search index for each customer.

Even with your own search index, however, you still had to wait for Google to index your pages. While that usually occurs pretty quickly, it could occasionally take days, and it all happens within the mysterious black box of Google’s search algorithms. That’s changing today: Google Site Search has added an “Index Now” button at the bottom of each page, and it does exactly what it says.

“We’re giving website owners the ability to come back to Google and raise their hands and say, ‘Please index my pages now,'” says Lead Product Manager Nitin Mangtani.

That indexing will occur more quickly, too, Google says — it should now take no longer than a day.

This kind of customization isn’t just a nice little feature. Loyal readers may recall VentureBeat’s brief fling with Google searches earlier this year, but we switched back to our current search tool (which definitely has its own flaws) when we realized how little control we had over the results. Adobe has been beta testing the new features on its community help site and says they were essential to ensuring that new pages were quickly available for searching during the launch of Creative Suite 4.