Welcome!

Open Source Authors: Paul Miller, Jeremy Geelan, Elizabeth White, Mark R. Hinkle, RealWire News Distribution

Related Topics: Search, Web 2.0

Search: Article

Google Finds Another Way To Charge for Search

Google wants to sell SMBs a way for visitors to search their sites

As a way of diversifying - this time exploiting its core competency - and bringing in still more money, Google wants to sell SMBs a way for visitors to search their sites.

It calls the hosted, extranet service Custom Search Business Edition and is offering it for $100 a year for 5,000 pages and $500 a year for 50,000 pages.

Google claims it can have a guy signed up online and running in 10 minutes and that appears to include refinements like sectional groupings.

The widgetry is a development of the free, ads-based Google Custom Search Engine that it introduced last October, adding business integration features through an XML API, turning off the Adwords ads and offering the user a more customized look-and-feel as well as e-mail and phone support. It also reports on what people looked for.

It's sort of the poor man's $30,000 Google Search Appliance or $2,000 Google Mini, which offer additional control over crawl depth and time as well as secure access to internal documents.

Google is waiting for feedback before it tries making the service into an advertising vehicle.

More Stories By Search News Desk

SYS-CON Media's Search Developer's Journal (search.sys-con.com), is the first and only global publication to present the hottest timely topics on the merging search engine companies, search optimization and search engine marketing industry, and all related articles, feature and news stories for search technology professionals.

Comments (1) View Comments

Share your thoughts on this story.

Add your comment
You must be signed in to add a comment. Sign-in | Register

In accordance with our Comment Policy, we encourage comments that are on topic, relevant and to-the-point. We will remove comments that include profanity, personal attacks, racial slurs, threats of violence, or other inappropriate material that violates our Terms and Conditions, and will block users who make repeated violations. We ask all readers to expect diversity of opinion and to treat one another with dignity and respect.


Most Recent Comments
Google News Desk 07/21/07 09:16:09 AM EDT

As a way of diversifying - this time exploiting its core competency - and bringing in still more money, Google wants to sell SMBs a way for visitors to search their sites. It calls the hosted, extranet service Custom Search Business Edition and is offering it for $100 a year for 5,000 pages and $500 a year for 50,000 pages. Google claims it can have a guy signed up online and running in 10 minutes and that appears to include refinements like sectional groupings.