You can give your search engine a name and description. You can also enter a list of keyword that will be used to tune your search engine results. You can also set specific sites to search, so only those sites defined are searched. Here’s a bit from the Google Blog:
We’re thrilled to tell you that the search for your own search engine is over. Today we are launching the Google Custom Search Engine. As you might imagine, it’s a simple and straightforward product to use and understand. In a matter of minutes you can create a search engine that reflects your knowledge and interests; looks and feels like your own; and, if you choose, you can make money from the traffic you receive through Google’s AdSense program. You can even invite your friends and trusted community members to add to and help build your search engine.
RealClimate has already built this new service into their website. So, head over there if you want to see the thing in action. That site actually worked with Google previous to the launch of Google Custom Search Engine so they could get a nice demonstration put together by the launch day.
The Internet Explorer development team has posted a list of CSS changes made in Internet Explorer 7. There’s lot of good ones, lots. My favorite of all of them is PNG transparency. Transparent PNG’s will now show up correctly in Internet Explorer! yay!!
Other major changes include :hover for all elements and the implementation of position:fixed. Super. Welcome to the 21st century Internet Explorer.
WordPress Multi-user 1.0 has been released. WordPress MU is designed for hosting and managing hundreds or thousands of blogs, similar to WordPress.com. Setup of WordPress MU is considerably more difficult than setting up a stand-alone WordPress installation. Here’s some text from the post to the WordPress development blog:
WordPress MU is an official branch of WordPress that is designed for managing and hosting thousands of blogs instead of just one. It’s the software that powers WordPress.com, for example. MU has been in heavy development for about a year now, and we’ve finally polished it up to a place where we feel like it’s ready for public consumption. Since setup is a bit more complex than the 5-minute install of regular WordPress, MU is best suited for a more server-savvy audience. You can download it on the WordPress MU site.
bbPress 0.72 was also released. bbPress is a piece of forum software “with the WordPress touch”.
I’ve been using Songbird 0.2 all day long. The first thing I noticed was how slow Songbird is at parsing ID3 tags. I’ve only got 1,276 songs in my library and it took 5+ minutes to scan all those mp3 files and figure out the artists/albums.
The volume seems flaky too. I’ll set the volume and go work on something else, and I swear it sounds like the volume is rising and falling slightly as I work with other applications.
I really like the interface, it’s very quick and responsive, and it looks pretty too. I really can’t believe how responsive it is. I sort of expected it to be on par with iTunes, slow as hell.
If you’re going to give Songbird a try, the minimize to tray plugin is a must. Well, it is for me, I hate clutter on my taskbar. Songbird 0.2 has been very stable for me so far, it hasn’t crashed or died unexpectedly once. I will probably end up sticking with Songbird as my main music player, mostly because it’s cross-platform.
The Undersigned is running another blog survey. The first survey didn’t go over so well, with only 39 people participating. I wasn’t one of those 39. I was unaware of the survey until earlier this morning.
So far in the second survey, 111 bloggers have participated. The second survey has been going on since October 18th, so two days now. They’ve added a live results page for this second survey also. Some pretty interesting results so far. There’s lots of new bloggers, a majority of those who’ve taken the survey started blogging this year, in 2006.
One thing that surprised me was the number of people hosting their blog by themselves versus using a free blogging service such as wordpress.com. 91% of those surveyed are hosting their blog themselves. I expected there would be more people using free blogging services.
