San Francisco — Internet search leader Google Inc.’s “Custom Search Business Edition” is undergoing a metamorphosis — by introducing Google Site Search, a most up-to-date solution that lets businesses customize the search results that visitors see when they search for information within their own sites.
“The Site Search service, like its less elegantly named predecessor, essentially aims at the same goals, but with enhanced functionality.”
Instead of offering visitors to a particular website the same slice of search results they find by searching Google.com, Google promises to roll a hosted search solution that will increase visitor satisfaction and loyalty, and lets website owners display the most relevant products and previously untracked pages deep inside their sites, increase website conversions and sales and reduce support costs by enhancing self-service online.
“Search continues to be the way people find information,” said Google enterprise product director Matt Glotzbach. “It has really taken over as the navigation pattern for the Web. We are really set on addressing that and creating a hosted search offering that is accessible to everyone.”
The service addresses every organization that wishes to insert Google search functionality into their websites, by providing them with an easy, quick solution to create a search engine that encompasses all of the website’s main features.
It adds business incorporation attribute through a machine-readable computer programming interface, the option to turn off advertisements, a more tailored look-and-feel for searching the site and technical support via e-mail or phone.
“Google Site Search is targeted more for businesses and government sites that want search but do not want to display ads,” Nitin Mangtani, a product manager in Google’s Enterprise division, said in a telephonic interview.
With the aid of the Enhanced Index Coverage, any search should be able to turn out valid results by crawling and indexing more content than ever before, even for pages that are deep within a site, Google explained.
The new Site Search offers improved index coverage. It now also indexes documents on public sites that otherwise would not be indexed. Glotzbach described these files as “content that the crawler knows about but is not in the main index due to space constraints.” Public documents hidden behind submission forms represent the types of files that might not normally make it into Google’s index, he explained.
In addition to the simple name to remember, the three major enhancements that are designed to tempt users include: a provision for synonym matching, results tweaking, and indexing of so-called “dark web” content.
- Enhanced Index Coverage: A wide-ranging search results produced on any website by crawling and indexing more content, even pages deep within the site.
- Synonyms: Queries expand to include commonly-searched terms means that if you run a site that often uses different phrases to describe things or frequently refer to terms by their acronyms, e.g. a search for [car] will now include [cars] or [automobiles]. And Site Search administrators can add their own custom synonym dictionary to associate specific search terms with each other.
- Date Biasing: This connotes that if your website includes news content, you can bias the indexed content based on its date, forcing newer pages to appear higher up in the search results, e.g. (a recent product datasheet is weighted more heavily than older product documents). Similarly, if your homepage offers users the option to buy products, such as an online retailer, you can give preference for product pages in searches.
By enabling Google Site Search, the website can use special sitemaps to recognize these pages, making them easier for visitors to find using simple searches. Also, site owners can fully customize the search results interface to integrate with the unique look and feel of their sites.
Innumerable website publishers rely on Google’s AdSense program to offer classic Google Web search. They make money running advertisements from Google’s network of online advertisers.
Site Search is a substitute to the Google Search Appliance, which Google offers to sites wishing to maintain their own search services inside their own data centers. Google counts more than 10,000 active Search Appliance customers.
Google is the only mainstream Web search provider to offer businesses a hosted service on Google’s network of computers rather than asking customers to install and maintain search equipment of their own.
By contrast, rivals like Autonomy Corp. Plc and FAST, which was recently acquired by Microsoft Corp., require customers to install and manage their search software in-house, Mangtani said.
Google Site Search costs $100 for up to 5,000 pages, $500 for 5,001 to 50,000 pages, $850 for 50,001 to 100,000 pages, and $2,250 for 100,001 to 300,000 pages. Businesses with more than 300,000 pages have to contact Google sales for a quote.
Google says businesses can sign up and have Google Site Search available on their sites in about 10 minutes. The hosted search solution offers support in 24 languages, and those interested can sign up here for the beta version.