Google upgrades Web site search service for businesses

Computerworld - Google Inc. on Tuesday is announcing a series of improvements to its midrange custom search service for Web sites, as well as renaming the offering.

Launched last July as Google's Custom Search Business Edition, the fee-based hosted service lets Web sites incorporate a Google search field for visitors to use in looking for content.

One change to the service, which is being renamed Google Site Search, is that webmasters now can submit site maps to ensure that Web pages that might be otherwise overlooked by the Google.com crawler are included, said Nitin Mangtani, Google's lead product manager for enterprise search.

The revamped service will also let customers add synonyms to link related search terms unique to their sites. For instance, a webmaster could ensure that a search for GE would also include results for General Electric, Mangtani said.

In addition, Web site administrators now can enable "date biasing" — so that, for instance, newer documents will be ranked higher in search results. And they will get other ways to control the top results produced by searches, such as giving higher importance to content from a specific part of a site. For instance, an e-commerce site could ensure that hits from its product catalog ranked higher than those from its corporate backgrounder.

Some site admins may be disappointed by the fact that Google isn't making several other changes to the search service. First, it isn't adding the customized search indexes from Google Site Search customers to the index underlying its primary search engine. Mangtani said the company wants to keep the Google.com engine free from companies that might try to raise their Web site's PageRank score by illicitly "gaming" Google Site Search results.

Also, although Google Site Search lets Web site visitors search by document type and language while excluding unwanted terms, it doesn't let them explicitly set search dates, Mangtani said. He added that the arrival of such a feature is "just a matter of time" but didn't elaborate.

Mangtani said that the hosted service still doesn't require any hardware or software to install. Pricing also remains the same: $100 per year for Web sites with up to 5,000 pages, ranging up to $2,250 annually for sites with between 100,000 and 300,000 pages. Google doesn't quote prices for larger sites.

Google Site Search has "thousands" of customers, Mangtani said, adding that the company is targeting the "millions of sites with no search box on them."

The service's higher-end cousin, a device called the Google Search Appliance, has more than 10,000 customers, according to Mangtani. The appliance is aimed at use on corporate intranets instead of on public Web sites, and it requires the installation of a rack-mount server running Google's search software.

Google also offers a free version of Google Custom Search that is being used by more than 100,000 Web sites, Mangtani said.

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