About a week ago Google a beta what they are terming the "Co-op" search engine.  Just today I found a little bit of time to play around with it and see what it's all about...

Basically the idea is that anyone can create their own customized search engine.  You get to decide what sites are included and how the results are displayed.  My experiment was to try and create a search engine that would only include the websites of all ActiveRain members.  Unfortunatly trying to add 5,000+ websites to the customized web search caused the page to blow up on me.  I finally settled on a shorted list, only including the top 500 (based on score) agent and broker websites.  Try my ActiveRain member site search...

The first thing I noticed in the customized search that there seemed to have twice the amount of adsense ads as the normal google search.  It took me about 10 minutes to find a way to actually turn them off, by declaring that the search was for a non profit.  Of course the sole purpose of these "custom" search engines is to give Google more ad space. 

The next thing that I noticed was the results were not that great, often returning link exchange pages as opposed to content pages on the sites.  The overall relavency of the search results seemed pretty low, despite the search including some sites with great information of the search term.  In fact when I searched on "Seattle Real Estate" not a single result in the first page was even remotely relavent.

All in all I was fairly unimpressed.   I know it's a newly launched beta, but like many of Google's latest innovations (cough... google base), it's a great idea but poor implementation.  The key is going to be improving the search algorithm to return much more relavent results.