What Search Engine is the best?

What are the best sources of info and examples (other than Google itself) of Google's paid Site Search, as applied to (what they call) a topical search engine (TSE)?

• As is (too?) often the case, Google's product info / documentation is erratic (i.e., incomplete, 404 links / pages, seemingly conflicting, presumes you know as much as they do, etc.) I short, I want to curate - in an sense - a topical search engine with (probably) GitHub being the repo for the list of sites in the TSE's index. Should that list be XML? What it's format? How do I add labels to each entry? How do I tell the TSE I only want a subsection of a side indexed (e.g., some-site/com/foo-bar/)? Etc. I've been up, down and around the Google (CSE) docs and can't find a good / solid "Let's us walk you though it" example. Nor can I find a "...and here's a checklist of the things you need to consider as you pull together your TSE". My sense is it a fairly straight forward process, yet in looking to The Google for help I feel like I'm going to end up doing a lot of chasing my tail, reinventing the wheel, etc. Is it just me? Again? :) p.s. I'd consider viable alternative to Google TSE as long as I have control over the look & feel, displaying of results, sites / pages in the index, etc. The bottom ~$100 for TSE seems fair. I'll pay the $100. What I don't want it to then spend $3000+ in time just trying to get it right.

• Answer:

  I was A2Aed, and as a competitor to Google with exactly this feature, I'm going to tell you how you can do it on our engine, not Google's. (Not my monkey, man.) blekko launched in 2010 with exactly this capability. We call it a slashtag. We have over 2,000 categories of curated websites, mostly curated by our in-house librarian team, with some help from external folks. You can think of it as DMOZ combined with a search engine. The curation data is open, and you can find it on github: https://github.com/blekko/slashtag-data Now as for using this feature: basically, very few users were interested, so we moved in a different direction on our website, using the curation to cluster answers for ambiguous search queries. You can see that by running ambiguous queries on http://blekko.com, or on our tablet app at http://izik.com. You can read up on how this used to work at http://help.blekko.com/index.php/a-tutorial-for-searching-with-blekko/, and if you go to http://edit.blekko.com, you'll be able to use the old interface. One caveat is that we have focused our crawl on sites in the existing 2,000 categories, so if you want to add a new site into a blekko slashtag, it will take 2-3 weeks for results from it to begin to appear.