Google announced their new Custom Search Engine today that allows users to create custom search engines by choosing which sites to include in the results and by refining the results to one's specific niche. Google says you can do the following with thier Co-op product:

• Place a search box and search results on your website.
• Specify or prioritize the sites you want to include in searches.
• Customize the look and feel to match your website.
• Invite your community to contribute to the search engine.

You can see a couple examples at the Food and Agriculture Organization site or look at the Indigo Travel Guide.Google also says that you can:Create a highly specialized Custom Search Engine that reflects your knowledge and interests. Place it on your website and, using our AdSense for Search program, make money from the resulting traffic.My take on this is that this is a brilliant move for Google. This basically enables millions of websites/publishers to create their own flavor of niche search engines and do the work for Google in coming up with great ideas for putting data together, creating a better more targeted ad experience for Google's advertisers and generate tremendous amounts of search data for Google to use to better their search products and learn more about me and you. This may give some small websites an advantage at first as the first movers will create really unique sets of data that are great content for their communities and they may be able to build audience better, but in the end Google owns the data and calls the shots and this would be basically building for Google. I also wonder how this could level the playing field in certain niche sectors, especially local search.
Take a look at the one I created here : Local Business Search