Google Boosts Hosted Site Search

Google June 3 upgraded its hosted enterprise search software, adding indexing for more content and simplifying the software's brand.

Formerly known as Custom Search Business Edition, Google Site Search is an enterprise search offering that seeks to be for the business sector what Google.com is for consumers: to help business users quickly find information they need to do their work better, or help a site's customers find what they want to purchase.

Google Site Search is one of a batch of enterprise search products flooding the market, including Microsoft's Fast Search and Transfer assets and rival suites from stand-alone vendors Autonomy, Vivisimo and Endeca.

These vendors are all vying to tap the largely untouched market for business-driven search, which is typically populated by lackluster proprietary products. However, those vendors don't offer hosted search, but on-premises packages customers can buy.

Matthew Glotzbach, director of product management for Google, said Site Search will give users the best of both worlds: hosted search capability that IT administrators needn't maintain because Google runs it in the cloud while letting enterprises control the feature set and customization of the product.

Business searchers can never access enough content about their companies. So Site Search now indexes more pages, even pages buried deep within a site.

Click here for photos of Google's newest data center.

To that end, the new Google Site Search (GSS) index complements the Google.com index employed for top-line consumer search, Nitin Mangtani, product manager for enterprise search at Google, told eWEEK.

"There are circumstances where Google may not index all of the pages, or we may not be aware of them," Mangtani said. "This is a special index so business customers can tell us what pages we didn't index on Google.com, and we will do the special indexing for them."

For neutrality's sake, the custom indexing Google does for Site Search customers will not impact the searches customers do on Google.com, he added. Search results returned on Google.com are still done by Google's ultra-secret search algorithms, while the Site Search index is based on customer requests.