Google launches new Site Search

The rebranding of Google Custom Search Business Edition now offers enhanced index coverage including documents on public sites that otherwise wouldn't be indexed.

Photo: Google launches new Site Search

Site Search, like its less elegantly named predecessor, gives businesses a way to offer Google search on their own Web sites.

"Search continues to be the way people find information," said Google enterprise product director Matt Glotzbach. "It has really taken over as the navigation paradigm for the Web. We're really set on addressing that and creating a hosted search offering that's accessible to everyone."

The new Site Search offers enhanced index coverage. It now indexes documents on public sites that otherwise wouldn't be indexed. Glotzbach described these files as "content that the crawler knows about but isn't in the main index due to space constraints." Public documents hidden behind submission forms represent the types of files that might not normally make it into Google's index, he explained.

Site Search now handles synonyms, so a search for "car" will now include "automobiles," for example. And Site Search administrators can add their own custom synonym dictionary to associate specific search terms with each other, informationweek.com reports.

"Google Site Search is targeted more for businesses and government sites that want search but don't want to display ads," Nitin Mangtani, a product manager in Google's Enterprise division, said in a phone interview.

Hundreds of thousands of website publishers rely on Google's AdSense program to offer classic Google Web search. They make money running advertisements from Google's network of online advertisers.

Site Search is an alternative to the Google Search Appliance, which Google offers to sites wishing to maintain their own search services inside their own data centers. Google counts more than 10,000 active Search Appliance customers.

Google is the only mainstream Web search provider to offer businesses a hosted service. By contrast, rivals like Autonomy Corp Plc and FAST, which was recently acquired by Microsoft Corp, require customers to install and manage their search software in-house, Mangtani said.

Other features allow site administrators to add their own customized synonym dictionary, allowing website visitors to use site-specific terminology geared to a particular industry or culture. Google Sites also offers users a spell checker.

Webmasters have the option of fully customizing Google Site Search to the look and feel of the website, or they can rely on Google's simplified Web page style and make clear the ties to Google's services, Reuters reports.