Problems with search results

Autocompletions not appearing

Newly added or enabled autocompletions should be visible within a few hours.

If a few hours have passed and you still don't see any autocompletions, make sure you have included an appropriate set of sites in the Sites page for your search engine. Autocompletions will not currently be generated based on sites included indirectly via annotation feeds. Google generates autocompletions based on popular queries for search engines. If you've set your search engine to search the entire web, autocompletions other than custom autocompletions you add yourself may not be available to display.

Promotions not appearing

If more than three promotions are triggered by a search, Programmable Search Engine will select three promotions at random to display. To ensure a specific promotion appears, make sure that you don't create too many promotions triggered by the same query term.

Too many or too few results

If you're seeing more results than you expect, make sure you've specified that you want to search only the sites you provide, not the entire web, in your search engine control panel.

If you are not seeing a particular result that you expect:

Make sure that you have included the result or the pattern matching the result in your search engine. Beware of spelling mistakes!
Make sure the page you expect to see is in the Google index. A simple way of checking is to do a search on Google with the site: operator along with a few words on that page as a search query. For more information about how Google crawls and indexes pages, all of our resources for site owners can be found at Google's Webmaster Central.

Popular Queries list empty

The most likely explanation is that no query was frequent enough to make it 'popular.'

Stale content

There are times when pages that no longer exist in your content may appear in Programmable Search Engine engine search results. This happens when Google's index is not refreshed.

In order to remove the pages from search results, we recommend the following:

Use Google Webmaster Tools to request removal of those URLs from our index.
Because it may take some time for URLs to be removed from our index, use Programmable Search Engine to exclude pages from custom search results.

CAPTCHA, "I am not a robot" appears

A CAPTCHA can appear if devices on your network seem to be sending automated traffic. This traffic may have been sent by malicious software, a browser plug-in, or a script that sends automated requests.

If you share your network connection, ask your administrator for help — a different computer using the same IP address may be responsible. Learn more.

To continue using Programmable Search Engine, solve the CAPTCHA. It's how we know you're a human, not a robot. After you solve the CAPTCHA, the message will go away and you can use Programmable Search Engine again.

Learn how to solve a CAPTCHA.