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.