I'm in the process of configuring the Google Custom Search Engine (enterprise solution) to give a better experience and more easily managed display and results for users than either the K2 or Joomla solution.

I wondered if anyone else had installed Google CSE (the paid for version) on their Joomla / K2 website?

Any help much appreciated

I know its been 3 weeks since you asked this question, do you have any update on how you went since then? Have you tried out GSE yet?

TBH there seems to be so little support online that we've not been able to progress with it.

I've found a couple of unofficial solutions, neither of which have worked.

It's frustrating because the search solution we currently have deployed are no-where near as strong, flexible or controllable as Google's paid-for solution, but because of the lack of support, I've had to shift it down our priority list as we have other tasks requiring more urgent attention. It'll just have to wait until our developer has time... behind everything else!

Are you referring to lack of support for Google's CSE? If yes, then I am surprised cuz for a paid product, you should be able to contact them straight away for any support you may need.

However, if you are using CSE, I feel it should work with any components. Unlike Joomla's search, google doesnt need any search plugins since they crawl the links they find on your page and build the index based on their algorithms. I also found this Gsearch extension that allows to add custom search filter links for Googles CSE based on menu items. I think this will be good to have too if you do use CSE. I havent decided what to do neither. I am currently trying out Universal Ajax search and giving that a go. Although it works really nice, the results are still based on Joomla's com_search and the relevancy on search results are not as powerful as Google's. There is also a free Google's CSE and I might start with that first too. Still in a dilemma and not sure what I will do in the end.

Do fill me in whenever you get time to look into this in the future. :)

Best of luck.

I might be a little bit off on this one but I think GSE requires two things.

a) A search module which Google provides code for.
This can be implemented with a simple K2 Tools (custom code) module.

b) A page (or URL) for the results which the code is also provided.
Since Joomla! only has index.php you can try setting a menu item which points to a K2 item.
In that item you can paste the code Google gives you. If the editor does not allow you to have JS code you can use a custom code module.