Search Expander is Live!

Search Expander, our spin-off project to SearchScene, is now finally live. Search Expander offers knowledge panels, instant answers and widgets to alternative search engines. This helps alternative search engines to expand their search results, improve the search experience for their users and so help them compete more effectively with Google.

Whether it be a charitable search engine (like SearchScene), a private search engine, or a search engine with some other unique selling point, Search Expander’s data can vastly improve the user’s search experience, helping to attract more users and increase user retention. With this in mind, we hope that Search Expander’s services will more than pay for themselves.

Knowledge Panels & Instant Answers

Our knowledge panels and instant answers are already an improvement on what our users were used to seeing on SearchScene, with faster loading knowledge panels and improved trigger-points, which yield a much better range of instant answers. Want to know how old someone is, or see the cast list for your favourite movie? Just ask! Our knowledge panels also automatically get better, as more and more people use our service. Check out some example searches on our demo site SearchOmega.com.

SearchOmega Search Results – Iron Man Similar Movies – Thor: The Dark World

Ease of Installation

Search Expander’s data can be added to a search engine’s search results pages with just a few lines of Javascript. First, the search engine administrator needs to configure their search engine within their configuration area on SearchExpander.com, select which data sets they want to show, which Instant Answers they want, select their colour scheme, and so on. Then, they add our Javascript to their search results page and define the containers for our knowledge panels, instant answers and top media bar. And that’s it! We will take care of the rest! Our Javascript will read the search results and, if required, call for the correct knowledge panel, instant answer or widget from our database. Search Expander can be integrated in less than 15 minutes!

Check out our demo site at SearchOmega.com to see Search Expander’s API added to a simple Google Programmable Search Engine. You can view the HTML source code of the search results page to see how simple the implementation is and how easy it is to integrate the Search Expander code into the search results – there is really very little to it!

Privacy

Search Expander has a robust privacy policy – we do not store user’s search queries, IP addresses or any other identifying information. We also don’t store any of our own cookies on users’ devices. This gives our search engine customers and their users complete peace of mind in using our services.

For private search engines, we offer additional features, such as the ability to proxy all third-party calls and images, the ablity to proxy our own service, and the ability to use POST requests instead of GET. Although this takes more time to set up and adds some latency to the response (as with all proxied data), the result is that no third-party calls are made and no third-party cookies will be set. Instructions for this can be found in our documentation.

Future Development

If we can get a few search engine customers on board, we will continue the development of our knowledge panels and instant answers indefinitely. Future versions will include multi-language support, song lyrics, album tracks, video game info, sports scores, local business listings, restaurant listings, hotel listings, visitor attractions, flight information, maps and lots more. Our aim is not just to keep up with Google, but to surpass Google in terms of the data that we can provide in our knowledge panels and instant answers.