Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I use it now too on most of my sites because it looks better and is more flexible, but I will say this - I made more money on the traditional AdSense for Search code. Why this is, I do not know, but there's a marked difference (and I've been comparing them for well over a year now)
Clicks on the CSE search are much lower.
What I really should do (except that I haven't enough time to set it up properly) is to test it with a PHP script that alternates CSE code and AdSense for Search code and get some insight that way. It probably would also be useful to compare the results pages from a CSE search and an AdSense search to see if there is anything noticeable about the results or ads served that might be causing the discrepancy.
The thing is, I use the search mainly for the search capabilities, not so much for monetization (although it certainly is nice) The CSE search lets you customize; you can tell it to only serve pages from your site (plus ads) or to give preference to pages on your site, or to give preferences as well to sites that you link to - and I'm wondering if by the time you do all that, you make it so nice and relevant that people don't see or feel a need to click on any ads.
Just a thought.
...and I'm wondering if by the time you do all that, you make it so nice and relevant that people don't see or feel a need to click on any ads.
LOL. Maybe you need to do what Google does and include a lot of irrelevant sites in the results.
Viewing the examples they gave, there seems to be an option to make a devoted search engine/page or just putting a small CSE search box on an existing page. Is that correct?
I may have to give this a try.
FarmBoy
Then I have some sites built around CSE search (basically I've created my own niched search engines) that *only* bring up the results I've populated them with. They make a few bucks, but nothing spectacular.
Still, I'm looking forward to this new version, though. Can't wait to try it!
Update: i was wrong, [google.com...] has these features. Looks like Google wants to make it available from AdSense account.
This year I had no choice but to use the new one, and I've been pleasantly surprised. So far it seems to be at least on par with the old one, and maybe better. Hard to judge exactly, because I've changed around some of the sites where I was running it, so I don't have an apples to apples comparison. But I'm no longer worried about the revenue tanking.