1. A computer implemented method comprising: receiving a request to perform a search at a general search engine site, the request comprising a query received from a user through a search query interface presented on a third party website; accessing a search customization profile defined for the third party website by a provider of the third party website, wherein the search customization profile includes a topic identifier; mapping the topic identifier to a specific topic to be used for customizing the search; retrieving a set of documents responsive to the query, each document in the set of documents having an information retrieval score; adjusting the information retrieval score of each of the documents that are associated with the specific topic by a weight value associated with the specific topic; ranking the set of documents according to the respective information retrieval scores after adjusting the information retrieval score of each of the documents that are associated with the specific topic; and returning to the third party website, in response to the request, search results identifying at least a highest ranking portion of the set of documents and the rank order of the documents in the highest ranking portion.
1. A computer implemented method comprising: receiving a request to perform a search at a general search engine site, the request comprising a query received from a user through a search query interface presented on a third party website; accessing a search customization profile defined for the third party website by a provider of the third party website, wherein the search customization profile includes a topic identifier; mapping the topic identifier to a specific topic to be used for customizing the search; retrieving a set of documents responsive to the query, each document in the set of documents having an information retrieval score; adjusting the information retrieval score of each of the documents that are associated with the specific topic by a weight value associated with the specific topic; ranking the set of documents according to the respective information retrieval scores after adjusting the information retrieval score of each of the documents that are associated with the specific topic; and returning to the third party website, in response to the request, search results identifying at least a highest ranking portion of the set of documents and the rank order of the documents in the highest ranking portion. 4. The method of claim 1 , further comprising: providing a topical directory of topics, wherein each topic is associated with at least one domain, each domain having a weight for weighting a ranking of a document from the domain; receiving from a selection of topic identifiers associated with the topics from the directory to be associated with the third party website; and generating the search customization profile from the topic identifiers.