Enterprise Search: Google Expands Capacity of Custom Search Business Edition

Good News for Google CSBE fans!! Google announced today that it will expand the capacity of its Custom Search Business Edition. Previously it was only offering two options; 5,000 and 50,000 pages. According to Google, large number of clients have asked what to do if they have more than 50,000 pages. Today Google added two more options to the online Custom Search Business Edition offering. They introduced two new plans that businesses can purchase online:

1. Search up to 100,000 web pages: $850 per year
2. Search up to 300,000 web pages: $2,250 per year

Besides If you want to search more than 300,000 pages, contact them.

When I heard first time about Google's new offering, I wrote in my article about pros and cons of having Google CSBE. After a quick reading, I suggested my own company to buy the service and drop the open source Nutch search engine to serve about 1000 pages. Since it was just $100 for less than 5,000 pages, marketing did not waste too much time in buying the search services. Next morning I got a 'thank you' message, saying good things about Google CSBE. It took the marketing manager less than an hour to setup the account and get the search on the website without UI customization. Besides it was less of headache than managing the open source search engine for such a small website. We have also suggested to one of our very large client to include CSBE for their public search. This client has been struggling to support effective search to the public for a very long time. Since its inception, it has switched couple of search engine already trying to meet users expectation. If everything goes right, CSBE will start providing searches for the large enterprises.

I think this is one of the Google's best offerings lately. I think Google Search Appliance is great but Google CSBE is awesome for all types of Enterprises.