The AWS Blog

Earlier this week Google announced the release of a service that should make the task of adding search functionality to your company’s website cheaper, and easier than it’s ever been. I was lucky enough to get tipped off about this release by my friend Andy Steggles, whose website HolidayHomeRental.co.uk was chosen by Google to be a testbed for the service.

The new service, dubbed Custom Search Business Edition, is a hosted solution (meaning that you don’t need a web server or any special software to run it), and is priced at $500 for 5,000 web pages, and $500 for 5,000 to 50,000 web pages. If you’re looking to have a site of over 50,000 pages indexed, it’s probably time to step up to the Google Mini or the Google Search Appliance.

In the past we’ve been pretty stubborn with our clients with regards to implementing search on websites. Be prepared to spend the time and money necessary up front to do it right, and then also be ready to go through round after round of measurement and optimization before you feel comfortable that the user is provided with a good experience. If you want more information on how to optimize a web search experience, Gary Angel has a detailed series of posts on his blog about the process (the five-post series starts here).

The introduction of this service will definitely have an impact on the way web marketing firms like us steer our clients in the future for a number of reasons. Primarily, the cost-effective availability of a service that we know will provide relevant results will make us more comfortable suggesting that a client add search functionality to their site. Secondly, the ability to customize the look of the experience is an absolutely necessary feature (if it functioned really well, but still created a visual rift in the user’s browsing experience, we’d be less likely to suggest it).

On a more technical level, it also looks like Google grants you a fairly high amount of control over the results page that is generated (the results are delivered in an array). It will be interesting to see what kind of applications and mashups pop up in the near future that take advantage of this!

For more information you can read Andy’s formal review of the service here on his blog; there’s also a video on WebProNews about the service.

I’m looking forward to getting my hands on this service and doing some test implementations to see how it really performs. I’ll be sure to follow this post up with a more in-depth review once I have some first hand experience.