Google is offering small businesses the chance to provide a search capability on their websites…
San Francisco — Google Inc., the world’s top provider of Web search and online advertising, said on Monday it is offering small business Web sites a service that lets visitors search for information within their sites.
It is the same custom search available for consumers, but with no ads, and with APIs to allow enhancements such as adding a “buy it now” button for e-commerce sites.
The service unveiled is aimed at the millions of websites that either do not have search engines or are unhappy with the quality of their current search results, said Nitin Mangtani, a Google product manager.
The Mountain View, California-based company said Google Custom Search Business Edition, as the new service is known, is a service hosted on Google computers, for as little as $100 (£49) a year that does not require businesses to run Google ads.
“If you have a Web site, we already crawl your Web site,” Mangtani said in a telephone interview. “Now we are saying you do not have to manage search within your site.”
The move is certain to stir talk that the search engine giant is aiming for Microsoft’s enterprise business.
The new service marks a middle option between Google’s existing Custom Search Engine, a free, ad-supported service, and Google Appliance, a hardware device selling for prices starting around $2,000 which customers manages on themselves.
The free, ad-supported service lets visitors search for information inside a particular Web site but cannot be customized.
The Google Appliance lets companies using the device offer their customers the ability to search both publicly available data and secure data the company wants to remain on its own site but to which it wants to grant its customers access.
Google’s custom search also allows the creator or administrator to limit queries to a certain set of documents, such as those on one (or more) Web sites. For $100 a year, the Google service lets customers within a specific site search up to 5,000 pages within a specific Web site. For $500, it searches 50,000 pages.
Google will host Web sites of any size on a sliding scale. Justia.com, a Web site that allows the public to look up court documents in U.S. state and federal cases, is paying $15,000 a year to search roughly 1 million documents on its site, Mangtani said.
Custom Search Engine Business Edition also includes an XML application programming interface (API) for customizing search result presentation, technical support, and the ability to display search results under the company’s own logo rather than Google’s familiar red, yellow, blue, and green.
Using this API, a company could, for example, add a “Buy It Now” button to search results on its Web site that linked to its products.
Google Custom Search Business Edition requires a three-step sign-up process that takes about 10 minutes and requires the business to embed a bit of code on their home page. Potential customers include millions of small business sites.
The service runs on the same computers Google uses to run its public search services. In effect, Google is simply serving up a sliver of the data is has already crawled of the publicly available information across the Web.
Google is aiming Custom Search Engine Business Edition at organizations that want to deploy Google’s search technology to their Web sites but may not be ready to invest in the $30,000+ Google Search Appliance, which indexes both public and protected internal documents.
“Customers spend an enormous amount of time and money building their Web sites,” said Mangtani. “What most of these sites are lacking is search.”
The problem, as Mangtani sees it, is that potential customers who cannot find the information they are seeking will go to another Web site.
The solution Mangtani proposes, Google Custom Search Engine Business Edition, has the advantage of not requiring any hardware or setup.
“All I do is to go to this Web page, set up my search engine, generate four lines of HTML code, and then drop it on my home page and I’m done,” he said. “The technological barrier to set up search on your Web site is dramatically reduced by this offering.”
Andy Steggles, president of Holiday Home Rental, an online directory of holiday rental homes, said the addition of Google’s Custom Search Engine Business Edition resulted in a 30% increase in referrals to homeowners and a significant decrease in customer service requests.
Offering the new service would not create a lot of extra work for Google because the company already regularly crawls through billions of web pages to ensure its index contains the latest internet content.