• Reuters, Tuesday, July 17, 2007 11 AM

Google on Monday unveiled a new search service for small businesses that lets visitors search for information deep within their sites. At $100 per year, it's pretty cheap. The service will be hosted on Google's computers, but does not require participation in AdSense, the Web giant's advertising network.

The idea is to replace companies' existing search engines. The new service, called Google Custom Search Business Edition, is a middle ground between Google's Custom Search Engine, a free ad-supported service that lets visitors search for information within a particular Web site but cannot be customized, and Google Search Appliance, a $2,000 piece of hardware that indexes and makes searchable up to 500,000 documents within corporate intranets and other networks.

The new service requires businesses to embed code onto their homepages, following a three-step signup process and a payment of $100. Visitors will then be able to search up to 5,000 pages within a specific site. For $500, it searches 50,000, and so on, on a sliding scale. One client is the legal document search site Justia, which pays $15K a year to search nearly 1 million court documents from U.S. state and federal cases.

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