Google offers cheap site search for SMEs

Google has unveiled a new embedded site search tool designed for small business web sites looking to add advanced content searching to their online properties.

Called Google Custom Search Business Edition, the new service is hosted by Google rather than requiring the company to buy and install a custom Google hardware appliance or server at the client end, and costs from $100 (£49) per year. Particularly important is the fact that users of this discounted service will not be required to run Google ads on their site.

"If you have a website, we already crawl your website," Nitin Mangtani, a product manager in Google's Enterprise division, said in a telephone interview. "Now we are saying you don't have to manage search within your site."

Business Edition is a middle option between Google's existing Custom Search Engine, which is free and requires users to carry Google ads on heir site in return for the embedded search technology, and Google Appliance, the company's range of hardware server devices that a company installs in its own data centre and manages itself. Google Appliance hardware costs stat at £1,000 and up.

The free, ad-supported service is a fixed solution that lets visitors search for information inside a particular website but cannot be customised. The Google Appliance lets companies using the Google-branded hardware to search both publicly available data and secure material the company wants to expose to users.

For $100 a year, the Google service lets customers within a specific site search up to 5,000 pages within a specific site. For $500 a year, it searches 50,000 pages.

Google will host sites of any size on a sliding scale. Justia.com, a site that allows the public to look up court documents in US state and federal cases, is paying $15,000 a year to search roughly one million documents on its site, Mangtani said.

The service runs on the same computers that host Google's main search sites.

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