Google Enterprise Search Questions

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Everybody,

A client has asked me to take a look at Google Enterprise Search for them. It has been a few years since I last fooled around with implementing a Google search box on a website, and that was the free version which included off-site results in the results.

This appears to be the main page describing the paid product:

http://www.google.com/enterprise/search/

I have three questions:

1. The search testing function on the above page doesn't seem to be working. I'm typing in a URL and search term, as prompted, and the page is simply refreshing. It never provides me an example set of results. Is it working for you?

2. This client has a moderately large e-commerce site (about 200 products). Have you implemented Google enterprise search on such a site and are you happy with its performance? The goal here is to let users search for a topic and be returned both product and informational pages. How well does this tool do this?

3. Am I going to need to know any special types of coding (beyond html/css) to implement this? If so, what are they?

If you have experience with this product, I would surely appreciate your feedback. Thank you!

[MiriamEllis]

Paul,

Your answer was incredibly helpful - so much so that I'm going to endorse it. You not only pointed me in the right direction, you really helped me to feel confident that this will be a good solution for my client. Sincerely appreciate it!

[ThompsonPaul]

Don't think that link you posted is the one you meant, Miriam. That product is the actual Google server appliance that you would install in-house to drive extremely sophisticated search functions for your company's internal documents (and can also be configured to index your web site.) and would be overkill for your purpose.

Weren't you actually looking at Google Site Search? It's the one that starts at $100/yr to remove Google ads & branding from their default internal website search, and allows you to apply your own styling, to bias the search for recency, and even to insert your own promotional results into autocomplete on your site's search engine. It starts at $100/yr for 20,000 search queries.

And yea, that page's example search functionality is borked for me too - not sure what's going on there. The product itself works really well though. It does only need html/css to add your own look & feel. The addition of labels, customizations, promo results etc is all done through check boxes and text fields on the admin dashboard.

The one challenge can be that you're depending on Google to do the indexing. You can trigger a request for indexing yourself, but if the site gets a lot of new content added really frequently, there can be a delay (up to 24 hrs) before that content is available to internal search. Note that this process in no way affects, for better or worse, your Google SERPS indexing. The two processes are completely separate.

For your specific situation of returning both product and info pages, you'd need to work with the label functionality of Site Search. The built-in synonym capability is also a huge improvement over most default site search.

Overall, I've found this a great solution for websites that are either built on a framework that doesn't have a quality site search built in or plugin, or for sites that are a combination of several technologies whose built-in search isn't capable of indexing each others' technologies. (An indexer that can directly access your own site's database is usually faster & more configurable, but takes more coding, and puts additional load on the site's own server.)

That the kind of info you're looking for?

Paul