Blogger has now taken the Google search gadget out of draft and added it to the list of gadgets you can add to your blog sidebars. This means you can use Add a Gadget to add and configure it instead of having to set it up in Google Custom Search, then copy the code into an HTML/JavaScript gadget to insert it the blog.
In the Configure Search Box window you can choose whether you want your readers to be able to search just your blog, the whole Web, pages you have linked to or the sites in your Blog Roll and link lists. Or, perhaps, all of them.
The choice is yours, as is the title. You may want to change it from the default “Search This Blog” to whatever best suits your requirements.
Clicking on “Save” when you have made your choices will add the gadget using your blog’s style and colours. So you will no longer need to bother about styling it to match the blog.
Now, in case you are wondering why the search choices are listed under tabs it is because the search results will open in tabs in your blog and will be styled to suit the look and feel of your blog. You can see an example here on Google’s Ajax APIs Blog.
A word of caution. If you have not made your blog public so that it can be indexed by search engines you will be given a warning notice. If you continue and click save, the gadget will be added but may not appear in your sidebar until you go to Setting>Basic and change the selection next to “Let search engines find your blog” to Yes.
Once installed you will have a custom search engine which, because it uses the Ajax Search APIs, will be constantly updated as you change or update your link lists and Blog Roll. And, best of all, the results will be inline and closely integrated with your blog.
The only gripe I have is that you cannot do this for AdSense for Search. So you will still have to configure AdSense for Search yourself and copy the code to the HTML/JavaScript gadget. Let’s hope that Blogger introduces an AdSense version soon.
