Google offers Custom Search Business Edition for SMBs

Google introduced a new service for small businesses that allows visitors to search within their Web sites on a customized search page.

The product, Custom Search Business Edition, adds to Google's growing portfolio of paid services for businesses. It builds on Google's Custom Search Engine, a free, ad-supported product launched last October for searching within a predefined group of Web sites.

A key difference with the paid edition is that businesses can customize the search page with their own logo and color scheme. They can also modify results by manipulating an XML feed of the raw search results to guide visitors toward products the company wants to sell, for example.

The service is priced at $100 per year for Web sites with up to 500 pages, and $500 for up to 50,000 pages, Google said on its Web site.

Custom Search Business Edition uses the same index Google uses to deliver its other search results, and Google's own servers are used for searches. To set up the service, customers follow a setup wizard and copy a small amount of code to their Web site. They get access to a reporting graph with daily and monthly views of how many times people used the search engine and what search terms they used.

The service provides an option for businesses who want to bring Google's powerful search technology into their organization but without paying for more expensive products. The company already sells the Google Search Appliance, starting at $30,000 for 500,000 documents, which indexes material in file servers, content management systems, databases, and other sources. It also offers the Mini Search Appliance starting at $1,995 for 50,000 documents.

Along with English, Google's Custom Search Business Edition supports Bulgarian, simplified and traditional Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish.

Correction: Due to a reporting error, this story as originally posted contained an incorrect name for the Google product. The article has been amended.