Shelley was feeling like poo and watching a movie in bed, Cameron was on the couch and deep into some Jean-Claude van Damme film and I was eating dinner next to a laptop. What better way to pass the time than figure out how to configure a Google custom search engine for our sites. Ta da...!

http://www.criminale.com/search.asp

For any conspiracy theorists out there that are convinced a cash-less society is the first sign of the coming of the apocalypse, I'm sure they would have something to say about Google as well. Give Google access to all your information, all your stats and all your metadata and in return you get a nifty search engine designed just for your site(s).

That said, it's pretty cool...

You can:

• Customize the look and feel of the search and results page (of course).
• Specify what sites you want this custom search engine to index so in our case where we have more than one site and more than one blog, all of them will get crawled.
• Let Google host the results. I chose to host them myself to preserve the criminale.com look and feel of the results by plopping them in my web page template that's just me.
• Link it to your Google AdSense account and (hopefully) make some dough from click-throughs in your search results.
• Add all kinds of refinements, new AdSense channels, key words, inclusions, exclusions and search customizations. I only understood about half of all this but it was fun and edifying to poke around and mess with shit.