A few years ago, if you wanted your own search engine, you would have had to work very hard in a garage creating algorithms and all sorts of crazy stuff. Now, thanks to Live Search you can create your own search engine with ease, without having to know anything about programming. Zachary Gutt over at the Live Search Blog has written an article on just how to do this. You can create a search engine to look at a particular site and search on that site, like the LiveSide one I created which will let you search through the LiveSide site. Or you can tell it to search multiple sites for a specific thing, like Andy Edmund's Windows Live search macro.
Macros of this kind are becoming increasingly popular, and increasingly useful with over 5000 searches already having been created on Live Search, even more useful is a search like my LiveSide search, if you go to it in Internet Explorer 7 in either XP or Vista, you will notice that you get the following orange button next to your search box:
What does this mean? It means you can search using this macro, just click on the drop down arrow and select LiveSide (or whatever the macro is called, it will have a * next to it), and you're good to go. You will also notice in the middle you have a link:
This will add that macro as a permanent search to your IE7 searches. So not only can you create your own search engines, but there are now the facilities to easily use them in your everyday use.
Links:
Andy Edmund's Blog - http://blogs.msdn.com/andyed
Live Search Macros (where you can create your own) - http://search.live.com/macros
Live Search Blog - http://livesearch.spaces.live.com/
LiveSide Search on Gallery - http://gallery.live.com/liveitemdetail.aspx?li=fad1526a-4fab-4e3c-b1ad-1872542ffac7&l=4
Live Search Macros on Gallery - http://gallery.live.com/macros/
SL