ShinySearch – Make a Custom Homepage in Seconds
This new service allows you to create “custom” (meaning simple templates) home pages for your site which feature a search and a graphic, including your business name or just your own name. It’s extremely simple and requires no login to use or save the results.
What you’re making is a home page for you to set as your default page for searches or the home page your browser opens on when you open it. ShinySearch is utilizing Google’s Custom Search option to create a customized search page. In this case, featuring one of many template graphics that ShinySearch has on their site.
So, for instance, if you use Firefox and your home page is the default Firefox Google search page, you are seeing a Custom Search Page. Using ShinySearch, you can change that to be any of a number of their graphics. Such as this one I made by just typing in the page’s name and choosing a graphic (in this case “Burning Guitar”) and clicking submit. It took longer to get the screen capture to show you than it did to create the page itself:
There are about a hundred graphics to choose from and nothing is to stop you from creating a new one every week or so to keep things fresh.
ShinySearch is free to use and the template you see is the same on all results, just the graphic and titles changes. Links to places you might go often such as Yahoo! Mail and the like are in drop-down menus at the top-left. There is no way to change those, however, so like I said “custom” is loosely used here.
Still, if you would like to make your home page a little more custom and personalized, then ShinySearch might be worth a try.
