Google adds hosted search service for corporate users

Google unveiled Tuesday a hosted service for businesses looking to add search capabilities to their Web sites.

Google Custom Search Business Edition is a fee-based service that lets users build a search feature into their Web sites with as little as four-lines of HTML code. The service is hosted by Google and uses the Google.com engine. The search capability works directly from the Web site a user is visiting and the search is performed on Google’s servers and only on the Web site's indexed pages.

“We are formerly entering the site search market,” said Nitin Mangtani, product manager in Google enterprise division.

The service is built on the free Custom Search Engine Google launched in October, but the Business Edition lets users eliminate ads from search results and does not require the display of the “Powered by Google” logo.

The Business Edition also has an XML API for customizing the search engine with such features as targeted search, e-mail and phone support, and reporting tools.

The API also lets users integrate search with Google Analytics, a free service, which provides additional reporting capabilities.

The Business Search fills a hole between the free service and the Google appliance, which users run on their own networks. Unlike the Google appliance, Business Edition users cannot launch a crawl of their pages at any time and can crawl only publicly available pages.

Custom Search Business Edition starts at $100 a year for searching as many as 5,000 pages, and extends to $500 for 50,000 pages.

Google’s announcement comes one day after ComScore, which collects data about Internet use, reported that Google’s share of search queries performed had slipped from 50.7% in May to 49.5% in June. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s share rose to 13.2% in June compared to 10.3% in May. Yahoo fell to 25.1% in June compared to 26.4% in May.