Public Service Search

Google offers a special service to nonprofit organizations and nonprofit educational institutions. It will index your site and provide you a special search box for your Web site so people can do a Google search just through your site. This is a little similar to the service offered to universities (see the next section) except that Google maintains the University search box on its site, rather than the Public Service search service, where the nonprofit or school hosts the search box on its site.

This is actually the same result someone would achieve by using the Advanced Web search features and limiting the domain to just your Web site. Providing this as a search box on your site makes searching your site much easier for those visiting your site.

Note 

To use Google’s Public Service Search, your organization must qualify as nonprofit according to IRS rules governing 501(c)(3) organizations and nonprofit educational institutions.

Register your organization. When you complete registration, the following message appears:

Your registration is now complete. Thank you for signing up for our Public Service Search program.

To use customized Public Service Search, you must create a search form on your webpage. Feel free to use the HTML we provide as a starting point.

Please remember that after your customizations have been submitted, it can take up to two hours for them to be pushed out to our servers.

Note 

If you or your organization does not qualify for the Public Service Search but you’d still like to host a Google Search box on your site where the search results are customized to the look and feel of your site, try Google Free at www.google.com/searchcode.html.

When you register, you have the choice of selecting the type of search service that appears on your site. You can choose to allow searches of your site only, or you can also elect to allow people to search the Web. To limit searches to your site only, select that option on the Search Optimizations page. Customizing your search page is one of the first steps in setting up your Public Service Search.

When you customize the Public Service Search, the results page includes your organization’s logo and is formatted to look and feel like your Web page, although the results are actually hosted on the Google server. The URL of the results page is www.google.com/u/organizationname.