Google Custom Search Business Edition
So, for various clients I’ve used various Google in various ways. My favourite, to date, has been the Google Mini. It’s a couple grand to get one of these li’l appliances, but it’s dirt easy to set up and lets you completely customize the look of the thing, what it crawls, how often it crawls, etc… Very nice. Other clients have used the usual google site search which gives you some minimal configuration tools and still others use the custom search engine (CSE). Google has just announced the Custom Search Business Edition.
This builds on top of the free CSE (which already gave you a lot of customization options, the ability to very easily embed search forms and results into your own pages, and the ability to add refinement tags and labels - the whole thing takes a few minutes to set up for basic use - if you’ve used any of the other Google services like AdSense, you can set this up). For an additional $100/year (for up to 5000 pages - it goes to $500/year for up to 50k pages) you get a bunch of really nice features. You can first of all get them without the ads, a great improvement over the free CSE. Or if you’re more technical, you can get the search results as an xml feed. On the customization front this brings it up to the level of the Google Mini, my long time search champ.
It also gives you some basic reporting which is pretty interesting. I rarely actually look at the reporting the mini gives you, but it may be very interesting for some folks and may give some clues on how to optimize and organize your pages.
The main problem with the CSE’s (free and business edition) is that you have no control over how often Google indexes your content. In general, Google comes pretty quickly especially if your content updates frequently. But it is certainly no guarantee - so it’s possible that for some period of time, possibly a relatively long period, new content on your site will not make it into the index. This may be a problem for some and a non-issue for others.
I haven’t played around with this bad boy yet, but I plan on getting to it soon. I think that the indexing is probably not an issue for many. The newest content will generally be the featured content so people searching will most likely be looking for older content, so if new stuff stays out even for a day or two, it’s probably not a big deal.
Google continues to do look for ways to build up a revenue stream that is outside advertising. At prices this cheap, I wonder how much this will turn into!
July 19th, 2007 at 1:17 pm
very informative article