What was used to be known as Google Custom Search Business Edition is now donning a new name, a simpler and direct – Google Site Search. And with the new name, comes several enhancements aimed at giving web site owners and administrators more control of the Site Search’s indexing and crawling behavior.
For those not in the loop, Custom Search Business Edition is a hosted search solution which increases site visitors satisfaction and loyalty, showcases the most relevant products, increases website conversion and sales and reduces support costs by enhancing self-service online.
Differentiating it with the free Custom Search Engine, Google Site Search offers more customization of search results, optional Google branding and most importantly it Google Site Search is ad free since you will have to pay Google to use it on your site.
Google Site Search works for sites with number of pages starting from 5,000 and which receive up to 250,000 queries annually, to sites with more than 300,000 pages and search queries of more than 500,000. Pricing starts at $100/annum and could go as high as $2,2500.
You might think that this is too much of an amount to pay for a simple search engine to index and crawl your sites. But the price you have to pay for may be well worth it once your sites’ regular visitors increase due to the satisfaction they get from searching your site.
Despite these useful features, Google Site Search (or Custom Search Business Edition) seems to be having problems when it comes to generating more users. Hence, Google decide to rename in to a simpler branding – Google Site Search.
And its got three new features to boot which include ways to influence the search results to the advantage of the site and its owners. These features include;
- Synonyms feature – allows users to upload a custom dictionary to translate or interpret site specific terms
- Date biasing – allows customers to ensure that the most recent published document in their sites gets higher ranking in search results.
- Top results biasing – allows customers to make sure that specific, not just the most recent, documents gets a higher ranking in search results.
Google Site Search is a promising site tool indeed. If put into good use by website owners it might actually bring in more good results to their sites. Just remember that Google Site Search even if you have to pay for it is still hosted in Google Server. So, you practically are driving visitors away from your site and pointing them to somewhere else. That, we wouldn’t want to happen.
