The recent changes to the Google CSE services appear to have introduced another glitch. The problem happens when adding new URL entries into your Google CSE. For instance, you can no longer add…

http://www.nnns.org.uk/sites/nnns.org.uk/files/

… and reliably select “Include all pages whose address contains this URL”. Oh yes, the Dashboard will let you save it that way… but then go back and open the URL up again. You’ll see that the CSE dashboard has refused to accept the setting you gave the URL, and has instead defaulted the URL to: “Include just this specific page or URL pattern I have entered”.

The problem with this is that you didn’t explicitly enter http://www.nnns.org.uk/sites/nnns.org.uk/files/* With the * wildcard making the “Include just this specific page or URL pattern I have entered” functional. Without the wildcard, the http://www.nnns.org.uk/sites/nnns.org.uk/files/ URL is null and void on that setting, and may as well have not been added to your CSE.

This has only just started happening, and the “Include all pages whose address contains this URL” setting is sticky on entries made prior to about 24 hours ago. Which makes me think it’s probably a temporary glitch, inadvertently introduced during yesterday’s switch from three-options to two-options for settings on individual URLs.

If you’re working on a CSE over the weekend / Bank Holiday (UK), you should be aware of this problem, as it probably won’t be fixed by Google until early next week. You’ll probably want to keep a .txt file of all the URLs you add which you have to use a /* for, because you may need to manually change them back once the problem gets fixed.