I am using Google Custom Search on my site, and I cannot seem to customize the results to look how I want them to. I am hoping that there is a way to define a template so I can define the HTML that the results will appear in and in what order. If that something that is possible without using the JSON API (since it's not free)?
It is not possible to do so, but you can customize the look of colors and fonts using the Adsense Custom Search builder.