Google Custom Search Refinements and the CSBE API
As part of my duties at SitePoint, I’m implementing a Google Custom Search Engine (Business Edition).
One of the neat features of Google’s CSE is Refinements. You can tag portions of your site – subdirectories, subdomains, or even separate sites that you’ve added to your engine – with labels. You can then create refinements that will either boost results from these tagged regions of your site, list only results from specified tags, or exclude certain tags altogether from the result set.
Unfortunately the means of using these programmatically are not so well documented – the API documentation doesn’t specify how to include or exclude certain labels (as far as I’ve been able to determine).
So! For the record, the solution is to use the strings ‘more:<label>‘ and ‘less:<label>‘ in your query string.
