Webmasters no longer have to “take the long way around” in order to integrate Google Custom Search into their websites. The Mountain View-based search giant announced that several hosting providers had embraced both Custom Search and Webmaster Tools, and that they would offer support for both straight in the Control Panel, allowing website owners to manage their content. This means that webmasters will no longer have to visit the Custom Search Engine website in order to build a Google-powered search engine, as it can all be done through the management console offered by the hosting companies.

“Although creating your own Google-powered search engine only takes a few minutes, we thought it might be easier if we delivered this functionality right to where many of you manage your sites online. Choice is a beautiful thing,” Radu Cornea, software engineer, and Rajat Mukherjee, group product manager, stated.

“If you own a website hosted on IPOWER, StartLogic, PowWeb, FatCow, BizLand, EasyCGI and several other web hosting providers, you can now configure Custom Search right in your hoster's management console – these hosters now support both Webmaster Tools and Custom Search.”

While Google is only enumerating a handful of hosting providers, fact is that additional companies offering similar services will want to jump on board in order to level the offerings. Signing up for the service via the Control Panel will automatically create an account for the webmaster. This move consistently simplifies the tasks associated with building particular Google accounts and managing Google services straight from the source.

In addition, “You can generate search engines for your websites by simply identifying your domains. Shortcuts are provided to manage your Webmaster Tools account and your Custom Search Engines. Sitemaps for URLs on your sites can be automatically submitted to Webmaster Tools for better indexing on Google.com. Your Custom Search engines will automatically recognize and use the submitted Sitemaps for enhanced indexing coverage. You can make money by associating your Adsense publisher ID with your search engines and sharing advertising revenue with Google. [And] you can upgrade your search engines to use Site Search for further control over branding, presentation (via XML results) and On-Demand indexing,” Cornea and Mukherjee added.