CALIFORNIA (OCN) — Are you using Adsense for Search on your site? If so, we thought you might want to hear about some new search features Google recently launched.

AdSense for search is now powered by Custom Search, meaning that you can take advantage of
advanced customization options to refine your search results and ads. In addition, you can manage all of the options below directly within your AdSense account.

Here are some of the new features you might be interested in:

* Selecting ad location: Now, you can decide where to place your ads on search results pages — whether it’s at the top, bottom, or right side of each page. Google recommends placing ads at the top and right side of the page, (as seen on this site) as they have found this monetizes the best for publishers.

* Refining searches with keywords: Search terms can have different meanings in different contexts, but now you can tune your search results and ads to what your users are interested in. You can see an example of this in the video.

In Google’s experiments, they have found that this tuning has lead to an increase in earnings for publishers.

* Improved indexing of your pages: Google recently improved their indexing technology so that you can provide a more enhanced Site Search experience for your users. AdSense for search will now
index even more pages of your site, as long as Google is able to crawl them, so that your users will see more results from your site in your AdSense for search results.

* Site Search: If you’re concerned about users leaving your site through Websearch, you can now you can choose to provide just site search so users can find all the information they’re looking for on your site. They also recommend that you host the search results on your own pages so your users won’t leave your site when they perform a search.

* Vertical Search: You can also allow your users to search across multiple sites – this could be a network of sites that you own or other related sites that you think your users might find useful.
Examples of vertical searches include travel sites, travel forums, or political sites you endorse.

You can get started with the features above by visiting your AdSense Setup tab and selecting ‘AdSense for search’ as your product. Just like with your ad and referral units, your ad settings will be saved within your account when you create a new search engine. You can then go back at a later time and quickly make any updates to your search settings. Once you’ve set up your search box, you may wish to explore more advanced features such as site exclusion, labels, and collaboration.

If you’d like to learn more about the new options available for AdSense for search, visit www.google.com/afs