Up until Bing, it was pretty much unfathomable that Google would ever see any kind of real competition in the search market, and perhaps Bing's early success has been a wake up call. It seems Google has been aggressively trying to improve the search experience as of late, including a bunch of just-released updates to its customizable search service.

Google Custom Search now comes with six additional themes to play with, all of which can be customized by changing fonts, colors, backgrounds, promotion settings, and various interactive features like tabbing and mouseovers, Google said. Even the search box and results placement are tweakable.

In addition to cosmetic tweaks, Google also launched a new Custom Search feature called Structured Search. With Structured Search, end users can look up information based on specific attributes instead of general terms. For example, if a Web publisher includes an author's name as an attribute in the app's metadata, users can ping the Internet for just a specific author and only get results that match the query.

Image Credit: Google