I am considering adding Google Site Search to my eCommerce site. However, I wanted to have the results displayed as nicely as possible, ideally with an image.
Is it possible to have rich snippets displayed in your Google Site Search?
If so, does it matter if your domain doesn't have a high enough authority to show rich snippets in the SERPs?
Rich snippets should improve search results overall (see Google's explanation, here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/99170?hl=en), and they do give you some control over what gets returned from a Google search, including a site search. As already noted, for site search this will be independent of your domain's general ranking. Likewise, regardless of ranking, snippets can improve the results returned (or, at least give you some control over same), regardless of where the results are presented (e.g., even on page 5 or 50 of search results).
There is a tradeoff. You can better customize your search results if you use a non-Google database search, BUT, google's site search will generally do a better job of handling synonyms, stemming, etc. (On an extreme, if you were using the Solr/Lucene/Blacklight stack with the necessary customization, you would come out way ahead of Google site search--but only after a significant development effort.) You'll have to decide what makes most sense, or perhaps experiment with what makes most sense for your site.
I could have sworn that Google actually provides an editor that will let you highlight pages on your site, set up patterns, etc., removing much of the snippets coding work for you. But can only find this right now: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/146750?hl=en
Good luck.
Showing the rich snippets is not that directly connected to authority of the domain, rather than the proper RFD markup. So if you have proper RFD tags, then Google site search should be displayed with the rich snippets.
You might be better off coding search results for you e-commerce site yourself.
reasons. your returned results can also search you db for items site search would never know about. for example you might want to show what is most popular first? or better show what results in most conversions and profits. with site search you are not going to get sort by price features. in other words sitesearch will give you google like results, while a sql based search can give you more tailored responses.
as for you question, site search now doesnt support rich snippets. might change in future.
