Hi  Terry, Everyone.  Sorry about the lag in response time.

Terry's method did work for me, with a couple of caveats.

• In Terry's point 2b he shows renaming Search.ascx.resx  -> GoogleSearch.ascx.resx.  This file did not exist in the /admin/skins directory for me, but only in the /admin/skins/App_LocalResources
• If you have multiple portals, you can create and reference a different search engine for each portal by editing the skin file in /Portals/#/Skins/ that you are currently using.  As always, make a backup first!
• Terry's point 4b shows the following string segment:  ""...?cx=<YOUR CSE ID>%3A72pzbzmchja&cof..."  The %3A is HTML encoding for a colon, and all the characters after the A are a unique code that is part of the CSE ID.  If you're copying and pasting this code, remember to delete everything between "<YOUR CSE ID>" and "&cof".  When you past your CSE ID in, it should look like "[partner-]pub-blahrandomblah[:foobar]".  I *think* the :foobar section only appears in CSE ID's that include the partner- prefix, but I'm not sure about this.  It may relate to AdSense tracking as well.  Anyway, if you've got the :foobar in your CSE ID, replace the colon with %3A
  

The portal/skin I'm working with now precludes too much screwing around with the layout of the thing, but there are several variables you can invoke throughout the process, for instance using radio buttons to select whether a search is local-only or web-wide, as is often the case with the default search behavior.  If you want to use the above string to search only your domain, you can do this quickly by adding &domain=yourdomain.com to the search string before the "&q=".  There are tons of other options, including site result weighting through the CSE configuration, that I haven't had time to touch yet.

Thanks for getting me pointed in the right direction :)

Nice!  "Kudos" for following up on the topic and documenting your process as well as updating this thread -- results like these really raise the value of the forums.  I've only skimmed through the article but it appears to be a thorough walkthrough of the process you used.  Thanks for sharing that!
 
-mamlin