Over the years, Google has continued to add new products, services, portals, and features to their portfolio. Keeping up on all that Google has to offer has been hard.

There are pages that show Google products options, or new products and pages that have Google ad options and the list goes on and on. One single page of all of Google’s services and products is hard to put together, so Google designed wdyl.com to let users search for the Google product they want.

How well does it work? Well, I searched for email trying to see if Google would return Gmail, the very popular Google email service, as a top listing. Guess what? Gmail is the second to last option on the right column.

Let’s not get into asking Google to find a search engine. I guess Google’s relevancy algorithm is not yet there for this service?

Here is an image of the search results for ‘email’:

Hat tip to TechCrunch for covering this.

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With the new Custom Search Wikipedia Skin, users can now get Wikipedia search results from Google inline on the Wikipedia page you’re viewing. The skin provides tabs to show custom search results from all Wikipedia pages, only Wikipedia pages linked from the one you’re viewing, or any page linked to from the one you’re viewing. The screenshot here shows the three tabs when you search for “sequence” while on Wikipedia’s DNA page.

Without the custom skin enabled, the same search leads you directly to Wikipedia’s mathematical “Sequence” page, which isn’t relevant to the original DNA content. This should prove to be helpful to searchers who spend a lot of time on Wikipedia. Instructions for enabling this new skin can be found here.

That’s just one of the Custom Search-related announcements today. Google has also introduced new ways to customize how custom search results appear on your web site. The new Custom Search Themes option in the Control Panel includes three layouts and several pre-designed themes you can use, and you can tweak those themes to match your site’s color, fonts, etc., if needed.

The final announcement is about improved support for metadata in Custom Search results. Users who provide specific markup in their web pages, and use a new hosting option called Element, can include things like image thumbnails and specific “action” links in the search results that Google shows. You can now also do special metadate-based searches, such as looking for articles on your site from a certain author. All of this can be tested via a new “Rich Snippet Preview Tool” that Google has also launched today.

Google will now automatically detect the device you are using to access the Google Custom Search Engine and serve up a mobile friendly version, when necessary. If you host it yourself, you can redirect the users yourself and serve up the proper mobile version to your searchers.

For more details about this feature, see the Google CSE blog and Google Mobile Blog.

Here is a picture of how it might look:

I was setting up a new domain last year, something I’d done countless times and could do with my eyes closed, when my hosting provider suddenly started pushing several Google products on me. Did I want to use Gmail for my domain? Did I want to use Google Apps for Domains? Well, no, but thanks. I think.

I found out later it was Google pushing those products via the “Google Webmaster Tools Access Provider Program,” which gives web hosting companies easy access to integrate Google products into their hosting services.

Google has announced this week that the program has been expanded to include AdSense, Custom Search, and Site Search; it’s also been renamed to the much more speakable Google Services for Websites. The service makes it easy for web site owners to integrate a variety of Google services into their web sites with just a couple button clicks. And hosting companies can get paid when their customers sign up for AdSense or Google Site Search.

It’s great marketing and visibility for Google, and clearly a convenience for web site owners who want to use these services. But folks in the Google-is-already-too-ubiquitous crowd are probably non-plussed by the whole thing.

This week, I am on a special trip known as the Blogger Delegation to Israel. We are being taken around by the Israeli Consulate to learn about Israel and the people who live here. Clearly, my focus is on search – so when I went to the Weizmann Institute today and met with extreme experts in the field of nanotechnology, alternative sustainable energy and even plant sciences, my main question was – what databases do you use for your research.

As I listened to information that was clearly way above my head, i.e. a new onion like molecule that when used in your car, it would never require an oil change again – I kept wondering, how can other scientists and researchers use this information to help their studies. How can researchers quickly pull up data, with citations, to find information at their finger tips.

So when I spoke with Professor David Cahen, he told me about his meetings with Google and trying to convince them to build out a search engine that does just that. In fact, he is on a personal crusade to educate the average person out there that much of the information out there on the web is either wrong or can be used wrong. His dream search engine would return accurate information, with citations listed, to your questions on how much energy does it consume to burn a certain amount of oil. Google is on their way to showing information on energy topics, such as their Power Meter that is designed to educate consumers about their power consumption. The issue is, according to Profession Cahen, it isn’t always accurate.

Cahen’s issue, in my opinion, is that Google cannot possible allocate their resources to building out a specialty database for this cause. If the Professor can use tools such as Yahoo’s BOSS platform and feed the data to BOSS, it might work well for his purpose. The main issue is that the professor does not have the time and resources to collect and feed this data to a search engine.

I was incredibly impressed with the work Ron Milo did with BioNumbers. Ron Milo is actually building a community of researchers, who add and edit (almost in Wiki style) to his specialty database. Milo’s main issue is getting his “pet project” out there to his community. What came to mind immediately was Google Coop’s Topics program. I cannot tell you how frustrated I was to hear that Ron Milo never heard of it. Why do I say that? Because Ron Milo is the exact person Google wants to use this service. Ron has built a structured data set that can easily be added to this Google project and might build out more awareness of BioNumbers.

Why is awareness of BioNumbers important to search? Google, no matter how good I find it to be, still has issues accessing structure data. Google Coop was one of Google’s answers, as is Google Base, Google Blog Search and so on. Yahoo BOSS or Search Monkey is another answer to these questions. BioNumbers can be expanded into other verticals, such as ChemiNumbers or GeoNumbers and so on. Getting experts to contribute to these specialty databases and Google and Yahoo educating these researchers on the tools they have to help build awareness of the answers the databases have, is incredibly important to furthering all sciences. Bridging the two, is a win-win for both the search engine and the researchers.

Here is a short video demonstrating some of the answers BioNumbers gives searchers:

The only issue is, resources – and who can the search engine serve best with those resources. The average consumer or the researchers? In this case, researchers need to build these data sets and feed them to a search engine. Search engines need to better educate these types of organizations about the tools they have that can unlock the data these researchers seek.

This is a lot like AdSense for Search, but the mobile version. Currently, this is a private beta so you need to fill out a form and be accepted into the beta to give it a try. Plus, this is fully hosted by Google and runs of their servers.

Site Search is Google’s on-site tool for individual websites; you use it to add a search engine to your own website. The new feature, On-Demand Indexing, lets site owners tell Google to index their site by clicking a button, rather than waiting for Google to do it on its own schedule.

A Google spokesperson tells us that this has no impact whatsoever on a site’s indexing and ranking on the main Google.com search engine:

“This feature allows site owners to update search results on their website On-Demand, by adding them to a special, separate index for their own site. Pages indexed with On-Demand Indexing do not impact the ranking or indexing of pages on Google.com.”

There’s more on Techmeme about Google Site Search.

Meanwhile, it looks like Yahoo’s site search tool, Yahoo Search Builder, has been taken down. It used to be available at builder.search.yahoo.com, but that URL now redirects to Yahoo Search. We have an email in to Yahoo, and will update this post as we learn more.

UPDATE: Yahoo tells us that, in order to “focus on core strategic priorities and deliver a superior user experience,” Yahoo Search Builder was closed down as of September 30, 2008. Says Yahoo: “Most of the functionality provided by Search Builder is available through two other Yahoo! Search services: SearchMonkey and BOSS.”

Those new features include look and feel customization, deeper crawling, the ability to upload specialized synonym dictionaries, “date biasing” (recent results can be more heavily weighted), and “Top Results Biasing.”

Google explains the latter category in the following way: “Google Site Search allows you to target the top search results from specific sections of your website (such as your product catalog).” Site owners can thus promote specific types of results in top positions. This can be used simply to highlight content or as a promotional vehicle (read: advertising).

Site search is also ad free. However, those that want them can get AdSense with their custom search results. Pricing depends on the number of pages indexed.

In the past, subscribed links, which is part of the Google Custom Search Engine initiative, would be listed in a green box at the top of your search results. Now, these subscribed links can appear anywhere on the page, from the top to the middle to the bottom of the search results.

Here is a picture showing the Search Engine Roundtable Subscribed Links within the middle of the search results for a search on google:

The image below shows me pulling out just the subscribed links portion, which is marked by the Google Custom Search Engine logo:

In the past, Google would place subscribed links at the top of the results, as illustrated here:

Google Blogoscoped has more examples at his blog.

If you want to make my day, please subscribe to the Search Engine Roundtable Subscribed Links.

Postscript: See Google 2D? Google Tests Vertical Results In Right-Hand Column on how this isn’t really Universal Search that’s inserting the unit.

Here is a picture:

They show you your current subscriptions and offer you others that “you might also be interested in…”