Google offers small businesses a website search feature
For the price of about $100 per year companies will be able to use Google’s easily customizable website search box without having to run Google ads. The Google new feature will allow visitors to access search results from any selected website. Along with helping visitors find what they want to purchase or sell, the Google search technology will help improve usability. Moreover, customer support inquiries will be reduced as users are encouraged to help themselves.
According to Google, the new service was made available for sites that lack or need improvement of their search engines. Some experts speculate, however, that Google is aiming at competing with Microsoft’s enterprise business. Also, another search tool for small and medium size businesses was recently created by Yahoo in collaboration with IBM.
The Google Custom Search Business Edition will handle up to 5,000 web pages for about $100 per year. Web sites can also search as many as 50,000 web pages for an annual fee of $500. Some experts indicate that they are willing to pay even more if Google would include all web pages of a particular website while servicing the results. Google does not always include or even guarantee to include, all web pages of a website and places some web pages into supplemental index. These scenarios are not quite favorable and experts are hoping to see Google improve in that direction. As it stands right now, the new site search is most beneficial to small business sites that are already indexed by Google.
Making query information available by Google is another expectation of the search community. Currently, Google provides incomplete query information.
According to Google, customers’ websites are already being crawled and now the new site search feature is available to companies so they don’t have to manage Search within their websites. Companies will be able to customize the search engine in less than 10 minutes. The new Google Enterprise product will be a great help and time saver to small businesses.
Nevertheless, some speculate that Google is moving towards competing directly with the Microsoft applications. Examples of other Google products or services moving closer to those of Microsoft include email, spreadsheets, word processing and more.
Google’s new service can be considered a mid range solution – between Google’s free advertising service, Custom Search Engine, and its $2,000 priced device, Google Search Appliance.
A few of my clients who outsource their site search are happy with the ability of their 3rd party solutions to allow tweaking of their algorithms within different factors, including meta keywords and more. Should the Google new site search offer such weighing of various factors, it’ll be of great help to all.
