This is one of Google's best kept secrets. It's a free service but you'll need to sign up for a Google account if you don't already have one. Within Google Custom Search you can set up as many customised searches as you like and then GCS provides you with a bit of code to paste into your website (or blog) and this displays a search box and search button. Like this:
So what is a custom search? A custom search works just like the main Google search but just searches the list of websites (or bits of websites) that you specify when you set it up.
This one searches all the websites that I am contributing to. This includes my personal blog, my cycle websites and the things I post here. Note that GCS can be setup to search parts of a website. So this custom search only searches my contributions on this site, not the whole site.
So what's the relevance of GCS for the new ruralnet|online? Well, if we go down the road that Paul is suggesting, ie we provide a Pageflakes page with all the key rural feeds on it, then we could also, in theory, provide a custom search to cover the websites that these feeds come from. So the pageflakes site would provide a snapshot of the latest rural information from many sources, while the Custom Search would provide a search over all of those sources. I'm pretty sure that the GCS could be incorporated into the Pageflakes page which would be neat.
ruralnet|online feed