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Google Custom Search Business Edition Renamed to Google Site Search

Google's search tool for customer websites gets new features, new name.

By Jon Brodkin

June 03, 2008 — Network World — Google  is upgrading its hosted search tool for business Web sites and renaming the product Google Site Search, the company is announcing Tuesday.

The product, originally called Google Custom Search Business Edition and released last summer, features enhanced indexing capabilities that aren't present in Google's standard Web crawler, says Matthew Glotzbach, product management director for Google's enterprise technology.

"This allows a site administrator to ensure that we've got all of the content for their site in a hosted index," he says. "This includes content in the so-called deep Web or dark Web, things the normal Google crawler didn't crawl organically."

The term dark Internet is used in reference to pages that are hard to find for various reasons. Some have no hypertext links to their content, and others are available only in constantly-changing databases.

The standard Google crawler misses some content related to Flash images, and information that must be accessed through specific queries, Glotzbach says. For example, while a user can access certain U.S. Census data by typing zip codes into a query form, the Google crawler wouldn't get past the query form.

Google Site Search solves that problem, but it takes some work. The process is partially automated, but site administrators will have to do some manual work to make sure the search engine has access to every URL, including those associated with specific database queries, Glotzbach says.

The upgraded Site Search also lets administrators upload a synonym dictionary, ideal for industry terms and acronyms that might be unique to a company or product, he says. A date biasing feature lets the crawler put more weight on recent content when turning up search results.

Another feature called top results biasing lets a customer specify which parts of the site top results should come from. For example, if a user is searching a customer support site, the top three results might be limited to official support documents, and anything after that could come from feedback and customer comments.

Google Site Search was tested in beta by customers such as eHealthInsurance and Business.gov, and is generally available. Google branding is optional, so Web site owners don't have to place the Google logo on their site.

Pricing for the renamed product remains unchanged. Annual fees start at $100 for searching up to 5,000 Web pages, and escalate up to $2,250 per year for searching between 100,001 to 300,000 Web pages. Prices for more intensive search needs must be obtained from Google's salespeople.

 

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