According to the Market Pilgrim, the Google Custom Search Engine Business Edition is now being given a new name and is now also equipped with custom indexing. This service will now be known as Google Site Search. Apart from the new nomenclature, there have been incorporated several new features and upgrades in the new version. These features are:

• Enhanced index coverage: Comprehensive search results on any website by crawling and indexing more content, even pages deep within a site. It would mean that Google will be looking for and assimilating more content so as to make the Search results even more relevant.
• Synonyms: Queries expand to include commonly-searched terms and website owners can add their own custom synonym dictionary.
• Date biasing: Website owners can influence search results based on the age of documents.
• Top results biasing: Specific sections of the site (such as the product catalog) appear at the top of search results.
• Full customization of the look & feel: site owners can fully customize the search results interface to integrate with the unique look and feel of their sites.

A main drawback of Google Custom Search Engine was that it relied entirely on Google.com. It meant that if a website wasn’t entirely indexed by Google, then the non-indexed pages would not be displayed in Google Custom Search. However, now Google Site Search can take advantage of other data, such as site search queries, that “could” be leveraged in Google.com.

Google Site Search charges $100 a year for up to 5,000 pages. Here is a snapshot of Google Custom Search:

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 at 12:34 am and is filed under Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.