Well, you’ve done it. You created a tab on iGoogle and dug around through the literally hundreds of widgets and add-ons and have created an interesting place to search for job seekers. Maybe you even got a little crazy and did some searching for complete custom tabs like the Twitter tab or even a tab dedicated to news or your favorite sports team – but that was just you doing your thing, right? All in the name of research, of course.
But you have to admit that at least once – even if only once – you wondered what exactly went into creating a custom search engine… and how you might use it for recruiting and sourcing. Sure you did. So what follows is a basic outline of what can be started using this Google based tool. I’ll just focus on two of the neat features to get you started. Let’s see where it goes from there.
It starts off simple enough. Just log in to your Google account and then point your browser to the Google Custom Search Engine page. Some of you that have been around a while remember this as Google Coop. No matter – you’ll have fun here either way.
Here you can simply click on the "Create A Custom Search Engine" button to get started. For this example we’re going to create a search engine that looks for resumes. Crazy, huh?
Title your engine whatever you like and give it a basic description. You can edit this later but for the sake of keeping it simple I’d recommend something basic. I’m calling this one Resume Search.
The only thing you’ll need to change at this point is the "What do you want to search?" option. For this example let’s tell it to search the entire web. Later you’ll probably want to go back and update this to focus more on sites you’ve targeted as ideal (social networks, resume sites, etc.)
Once you’ve agreed to the ToS, click Next.
What you’ve just created is nothing – so don’t get too excited. It’s a basic search gadget that searches Google as plainly as if you’d done the search from any other Google search field. Give it a test with the keyword, "Engineer" – see? Nothing major.
But here’s where it gets fun – Click "Finish" to be taken to your new "Search Engine Homepage."
Select the "Control Panel" of your new search engine. In doing so you’ll find several more options available to you. The most interesting of all being about half way down the page – Search Engine Keywords.
Let’s simply throw in the most basic of operators and keywords as we’re just looking for resumes. Copy and paste the following into the keywords field: (inurl:resume | intitle:resume)
Now save this and give your search engine a shot using that same keyword, "Engineer" – the results are a bit different, aren’t they?
Granted you’re going to want to add some additions to help – simple commands that will help weed out the sample resumes or sales/product pages at first and then graduating to more complex filtering. One thing you’ll need to keep in mind that on the front end there are character limitations in the initial keywords field – so be selective up front in how your engine kicks off it’s search and take advantage of functional shortcuts in your basic operators.
So let’s get refined, shall we?
Head back to your new search engine’s control panel and check out the left hand column. Within this listing of nifty tools and toys and settings you’ll see "refinements" – click this and let’s start offering up ways to add a secondary filter to our results.
Let’s suppose that you want to be filter your results to .doc or .pdf files. By clicking through the somewhat self explanatory steps you can add refinements as such, "filetype:doc" with a second addition of "filetype:pdf"to your search engine.
Even if you didn’t take the time to clean up your initial search results before adding your refinements you should now be able to test your resume search engine for "Engineer" and see some satisfactory traction beginning when you click on your newly added options, Word Documents or PDF’s.
Once you’re happy with what you’ve put together just head back to the main page of your custom search engines and click on the "homepage" link next to your search engine. From here you’ll see a handy link that let’s you add it to your Google homepage. When you click this you’ll find your search sitting on one of your iGoogle tabs – ready for you to start using.
Who knows? With some practice and a little bit of time perhaps you’ll create your own tab built just for sourcing – heck, some of my favorite personal search engines won’t ever stop evolving.
I’m keeping it relatively clean here – almost "Super Simple" if you’d prefer.
Will I post more about adding some complex preliminary filters or secondary additions? Probably.
Will I touch on how you can ‘socialize’ your tabs and what that could mean for you or your team? Oh yeah, that’s coming.
But what I probably won’t do is conduct webinars that do a deep dive around the Google Coop Custom Search Engines. If you’re looking for that – you’ll need to head over and talk to my friend, Amitai Givertz – author of Brown Bag Recruiter.
Months ago when playing with this idea somehow it came up in speaking with Ami. By coincidence we were working on the exact same thing and found ourselves literally comparing our progress via bookmarks and the custom tabs we’d built (it was scary how similar our work was, really.)
In short – if you’re looking for some advanced lessons or dialogue I would strongly encourage you to reach out to him. If you found this article even just a bit interesting, then you’re cheating yourself by not connecting with him.
