Google wants to tap small business web site search

Stan Beer
Tuesday, 17 July 2007 20:05

Your IT - Home IT

With literally tens of millions of small business websites ripe for the picking, search leader Google believes that a gold mine is beckoning in the provision of cheap onsite search services.

One of the weakest aspects of small business websites built to tight budgets is enabling visitors to navigate and find the information they need. Google currently enables web publishers to embed a free advertising supported search box in their sites. However, the capability to customise the search functions to direct visitors to desired areas are limited.

The new yearly paid service from Google enables small businesses to customise the look of their search engines as well as tailor search results to push customers toward products the company wants to sell.

A key advantage of the paid for service is that it will not produce keyword generated advertisements in the search results, a bone of contention for some companies who sometimes see ads from their competitors appear.

Another advantage is the price, which starts at US$100 for small sites and is just US$500 for substantial sites of up to 50,000 pages.

The small business search service, which is available in a variety of major European and Asian languages as well as English, could present Google with a significant new potential recurring revenue stream worth hundreds of millions of dollars annually.