Google is joining Yahoo, Eurekster and many others in offering a customized search platform that makes it easy for anyone to offer a highly tailored search engine. Several weeks ago, SEW correspondent Phil Bradley wrote about customized search offerings from Rollyo, PSI, Yahoo and in Your Search, Your Way (part one and part two).

Google's new service is an outgrowth of the Google Co-Op program started earlier this year, according to Ramanathan Guha, Lead Engineer for Google Co-Op. Co-Op was designed to allow users to influence search results in a couple of different ways.

First, anyone could create a set of "subscribed links," a service that lets people choose other non-Google vertical search engines to show at the top of Google search result pages, if they want to.

Google also entered into more formal partnerships with other organizations asking them to annotate high quality web content in areas like health care and destination guides. Google called these annotations "labels," notably avoiding the word "tag," but the annotations really were just another form of meta data.