According to this article, Google has announced a new custom search solution for small businesses. Also, according to the article (the reporters usually make lots of mistakes when covering tech) this new Google custom search has the following features/specs:
1. The search page can be customized, including the company logo, changing the background and fonts, etc...
2. Allows key phrases to be suggested in search results.
3. Results are delivered via an XML API which means you can customize your search page and search results page any way you want.
4. Upper limit of 5k pages.
5. Costs $100 per year.
6. Hosted by Google (You don't have to download anything or dedicate any hardware to it).
This competes directly with the product I work on (OYE). By the way, the views expressed here are strictly my own. I am NOT representing IBM or Yahoo! in this post. Here is how OYE compares on all of these points:
1. Our search and results pages can also be customized the same way (they probably took the idea from us).
2. We allow key phrases as well as featured links and synonyms which I think are more useful.
3. You can do this with ours but it seems like it is a bit more work than with the Google Custom Search.
4. Upper limit of 500k pages.
5. Costs $0 (FREE).
6. You have to put it on your own server (which can be good or bad depending on your perspective).
It can be good that you host it on your own server if you don't want the outside world to access your company's intranet. It can be bad if you don't want to have complete and total control over your search engine. There is at least one other thing that we do that it looks like the Google Custom Search does not or cannot do. Filecrawl search. Obviously because they have to tunnel into your company's network they cannot easily crawl your local and shared filesystems (nor would you want them to). At the end of the day I would like to play with the Google Custom Search to see exactly what it can and can't do instead of depending on one article which probably isn't all that accurate any way. But I applaud them for coming out with something to answer our shot across their bow. Competition is a good thing. It will make us and them better and the customers in the marketplace with benefit from it.
Posted by troutm8 at July 17, 2007 11:08 AM