Way back when Google first got VC, before they invented AdWords and got profitable, they explored a lot of custom business partner opportunities. So there were a number of specialized Google search endpoints like /linux, /bsd, /unclesam (search over Federal government websites). These were maintained until about 2013 - they go through a different rendering path than the one that serves mainstream Google Search. /linux, /bsd, /unclesam, and a few others were decomissioned in 2013, soon before I left Google, but it looks like /custom got a reprieve for whatever reason. It's actually been deprecated by the Custom Search Engine functionality linked above, but nobody's gotten around to removing it.
Incidentally, you can also get a similar page (slightly different, its last update was around 2007 and it shows no ads) by setting your user agent to "Mozilla 3.0".
But, the advantage of /custom: It uses less personalized results, and it returns exactly 20KiB of data – which is why it still loads so fast.
There was a day when I just wrote a small script to open all sites mentioned in Google’s robots.txt (which did not return 404) in a separate tab. That’s how I found it.
As far as I know, some partners actually still embed /custom (I’ve only seen it at a newspaper a few months ago), so removing it might be problematic.
> As far as I know, some partners actually still embed
> /custom (I’ve only seen it at a newspaper a few months
> ago), so removing it might be problematic.
I see it every so often if a domain doesn't get resolved - they'll hijack the request and show you their own page. I was pretty surprised that that still happens.
Ahh, heirloom. (That's the name of the system that renders Google for ancient user-agents). Takes me back. It actually got a small set of updates in 2010 when we wrote Heirloom+ and it appears that someone has collapsed the two systems into one since I left in 2011. I'm strangely gratified to see that no one has come up with a better layout solution than putting the results in a table.
https://developers.google.com/custom-search/docs/overview?hl...
Way back when Google first got VC, before they invented AdWords and got profitable, they explored a lot of custom business partner opportunities. So there were a number of specialized Google search endpoints like /linux, /bsd, /unclesam (search over Federal government websites). These were maintained until about 2013 - they go through a different rendering path than the one that serves mainstream Google Search. /linux, /bsd, /unclesam, and a few others were decomissioned in 2013, soon before I left Google, but it looks like /custom got a reprieve for whatever reason. It's actually been deprecated by the Custom Search Engine functionality linked above, but nobody's gotten around to removing it.
Incidentally, you can also get a similar page (slightly different, its last update was around 2007 and it shows no ads) by setting your user agent to "Mozilla 3.0".