Getting started with Programmable Search Engine

Update sites in your search engine

Next: Edit your search engine with the control panel

Adding and excluding pages or sites from your search engine.

Include sites in your search engine:

From the list of search engines, select the search engine you want to edit.
Under Overview, scroll down to Sites to search, click Add.
Enter the site/sites you want to add (you can enter a list of sites, one per line. Each line doesn’t need a delimiter at the end). See the table below "More on URL patterns" section if you aren't sure which one you want. Note: if the site you entered doesn't match a single page, our system will convert it into a correct url pattern format to match all URLs under the site.
Click Save.

Exclude sites from your search engine:

From the list of search engines, select the search engine you want to edit.
Under Overview, scroll down to Sites to exclude, click Add.
Enter the site/sites you want to exclude (you can enter a list of sites, one per line. Each line doesn’t need a delimiter at the end). See the table below "More on URL patterns" section if you aren't sure which one you want. Note: if the site you entered doesn't match a single page, our system will convert it into a correct url pattern format to match all URLs under the site.
Click Save.

More on URL patterns:

You can use URL patterns to specific part or all of a site at once, without having to list out all of the possible pages individually.

Entire domain If you want to include everything on a domain in your search results, enter the domain as *.mysite.com/*. This will include any pages in the domain, for example blog.mysite.com and mysite.com.
Entire site If you want to include an entire site, specify the site followed by a wildcard pattern. For example, mysite.com/* will include all content on mysite.com, but not content on blog.mysite.com.
Parts of a site If you want to include specific parts of a site, use a URL pattern to specify which part of the site you want to include. For example, mysite.com/*dogs will match any URLs that start with mysite.com/ and contain the word "dogs," such as mysite.com/dogs.html and mysite.com/lots-of-dogs.html. On the other hand, mysite.com/dogs/* will only include pages that start with mysite.com/dogs/. It would not match mysite.com/dogs.html.
Single pages If you want to include specific pages, you can use the page's URL. For example, you can specify mysite.com/mypage.html to include the contents of mypage.html in your search results.

More detailed examples are included in this table:

Pattern	Description	Matches	Does not match
example.com/	Matches a single page	example.com/ example.com/	host.example.com example.com/stamps
example.com/*	Matches all URLs beginning with example.com or example.com	example.com example.com/stamps example.com/stamps	host.example.com/ host.example.com/stamps
example.com/*kites	Matches all URLs that begin with example.com/ or example.com/ and contain the word "kites"	example.com/kites.html example.com/kites/page2.html example.com/funwithkites.html	example.com example.com/stamps
example.com/product.asp*cat=Elec	Matches all URLs that begin with example.com/product.asp and contain the term 'cat=Elec'	example.com/product.asp?sku=20283&cat=Elec	example.com example.com/stamps
example.com/kitesfly	Matches all URLs that begin with example.com/and contain the words "kites" and "fly"	ww.example.com/kites/howto/fly.html example.com/fly/howto/kites.html	example.com/kites/help.html example.com/help/fly.html
.example.com/	Matches all sub-domains under example.com	example.com/stamps host.parent.example.com/kites example.com/kites/fly.html	example.host.com

Note: URL patterns are case-sensitive.

Note: Maximum number of patterns per search engine is 5000. Tip: If you find your search engine outgrowing the large 5,000-site limit, consider consolidating individual URLs into URL patterns as explained above.

You may want to augment your results with general Web Search results. This includes results from anywhere on the web, but places emphasis on your personalized results. This way, even if they search for content that isn't on your site, they can find useful results. Note that results may not match the results you'd get by searching on Google Web Search.

To set an existing search engine to search the entire web:

From the list of search engines, select the search engine you want to edit.
Under Overview, scroll down to Search features. Beside Augment results, Toggle On or Off to enable or disable Search the entire web.
Selecting On will augment your results with general Web Search results. Selecting Off will limit your results only to the sites you specified.