How Non-Profits and Charities Can Raise More Money Using Google Custom Search Engines

I'm going to interrupt my new AdSense case study to talk about a way that charities and non-profit organizations can make some extra money providing useful services for their members by combining Google Custom Search Engines with AdSense.

What's a Custom Search Engine?

A Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) is a new feature of Google Co-op, Google's project to allow for collaborative customization of Google search results. CSE lets you create your own versions of the Google search engine that emphasize, include or exclude results from specific sites. Multiple people/groups can collaborate to build CSEs that meet their specific needs while still taking advantage of the breadth and depth of Google's search engine.

Like AdSense, a CSE is provided to you as a snippet of JavaScript that you place on a page. You can customize the look and feel of the CSE (logo and colors) and let Google host it or else host it on your own site.

Monetizing Custom Search Engines

Google displays ads on CSE result pages, just as it would on its own search result pages. But here's where it gets interesting: if you're an AdSense publisher you can associate your AdSense publisher ID with the ads in any CSE you create. This means you'll get a share of the revenue Google makes when those ads are clicked, just as with AdSense for search. If your CSE is popular enough you could make some serious money.

How Charities and Non-Profits Benefit

So here's an idea you can pass onto your favorite charity or non-profit. If they don't already have an AdSense account (and I suspect most wouldn't), get them to apply for AdSense. Once they're approved, they can then create a CSE tuned to their specific needs. Usually this would mean emphasizing results from their own sites and the sites of related organizations. Or excluding sites that don't fit with organization's goals.

Once the CSE is running, place is on the organization's main site somewhere and encourage members to use it as their main search engine, possibly even making it their default startup page. (It would be neat, too, if Google extended its toolbar to direct queries to a user-specified CSE.) The organization would then enjoy additional revenue from its membership while providing them with a useful service.

There are some caveats with this, of course. For one thing, advertising in general may not be compatible with the organization's goals — note that Google allows non-profits and charities to remove the ads entirely. For another, the organization would have to be careful not to encourage or otherwise entice its membership to click on ads for no reason — the AdSense terms and conditions still apply.

Something to think about, in any case. If anyone tries to use CSE as a fundraiser, I'd love to hear about your experiences.

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Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. If you like this posting, why not link to his blog or bookmark it as one of your favorites?

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