Google Custom Search, popularly known as CSE or the mini search engine which you can implement over your website to use the power of Google Search to let users find pages on your website efficiently has been updated to bring in features which was very much required.
Faster Load :
Prior to the update, CSE code was lot slower and in fact was so slow that I had to move it to footer but now this has been upgraded to load asynchronously which automatically loads when the website load is complete.
Settings are stored on Server Side :
Like Adsense, Now you do not need to copy and paste the code again when you make the changes as all your settings are stored on the server side.
Now you only get one simple javascript and HTML tags which can be implemented very easily. As the code is lot faster now, you can put it on your website header.
Client Side Control :
If you want to change something for a specific type of page or based on certain conditions, the html tags can now be used with parameters to do so.
So now if you have CSE already implemented, it will not break and keep working as is but if you visit the CSE control Panel, you would see the new settings. You can very well switch back to the older version but I will recommend you not to do so, keeping the performance in mind.
Said that, if you haven’t implemented CSE on your website, I will strongly suggest you to do so because its not only faster but you can include your other websites which has similar content.
Just a heads up, your website does not work in IE9 or IE8 because of the new Google Custom Search. Just tried it on IE and then on Chrome and Firefox. IE has a known problem.
Thanks. I will revert back to the old code.