The Google Custom Search Engine blog announced that you can now add a snippet of code on your site to show off the most popular queries (searches) performed by your readers. I am a huge fan of the Google Custom Search Engine but I am not a fan of this implementation.

(1) Of my Google CSEs, I have only one that has popular queries because the queries performed on the sites are so diverse that none are popular. And of that one site that has popular queries for me to display, it is only available for the “overall” statistics view.

(2) The code you place on your site shows the most popular queries, but it links those queries to the Google.com site and not your internal page, where you display the search results. So you potentially lose those visitors.

To access this, you need to login to your Google Custom Search Engine, click on the statistics section and then look at the bottom right of the page. If you do not see any popular queries, try to change the date range, if that doesn’t work, then you are out of luck.

Here is an example of the Search Engine Roundtable’s most popular queries overall.

You can see (if it works) that when you click on those links, it takes you to the Google landing page, why not send them to my internal search page if I had that option checked in my settings page?

Overall, I still love the Google CSE, but I won’t be using this new feature.

Related Topics: Google: Custom Search Engine

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz