Google Enterprise Search Questions
-
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:
-
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?
-
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?
-
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!
-
-
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!
-
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
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Google Penalty and Adwords
Hi guys, I am wondering if the google manual penalty or penalty in general (because of bad backlink profile) also means that your website is blocked for Adwords? Thanks
Technical SEO | | barobijav0 -
Removing site subdomains from Google search
Hi everyone, I hope you are having a good week? My website has several subdomains that I had shut down some time back and pages on these subdomains are still appearing in the Google search result pages. I want all the URLs from these subdomains to stop appearing in the Google search result pages and I was hoping to see if anyone can help me with this. The subdomains are no longer under my control as I don't have web hosting for these sites (so these subdomain sites just show a default hosting server page). Because of this, I cannot verify these in search console and submit a url/site removal request to Google. In total, there are about 70 pages from these subdomains showing up in Google at the moment and I'm concerned in case these pages have any negative impacts on my SEO. Thanks for taking the time to read my post.
Technical SEO | | QuantumWeb620 -
How Google sees my page
When looking for crawlability issues, what is the difference between using webmaster tools Fetch as google, looking at the cached pages in google index site:mypage.com, or using spider simulator tools.
Technical SEO | | shashivzw0 -
Duplicate Content Question
I have a client that operates a local service-based business. They are thinking of expanding that business to another geographic area (a drive several hours away in an affluent summer vacation area). The name of the existing business contains the name of the city, so it would not be well-suited to market 'City X' business in 'City Y'. My initial thought was to (for the most part) 'duplicate' the existing site onto a new site (brand new root domain). Much of the content would be the exact same. We could re-word some things so there aren't entire lengthy paragraphs of identical info, but it seems pointless to completely reinvent the wheel. We'll get as creative as possible, but certain things just wouldn't change. This seems like the most pragmatic thing to do given their goals, but I'm worried about duplicate content. It doesn't feel as though this is spammy though, so I'm not sure if there's cause for concern.
Technical SEO | | stevefidelity0 -
Google Search Parameters
Couple quick questions. Is using the parameter pws=0 still useful for turning off personalization? Is there a way to set my location as a URL parameter as well? For instance, I want to set my location to United States, can this be done with a URL param the same way as pws=0?
Technical SEO | | nbyloff0 -
Google Places phone number question
Hi, A hotel/resort has a main phone number of 1-234-567-8901. This phone number is consistent in over 50 directories. However, they have a spa and restaurant with the same phone number. The front-desk answers the phone and routes the call to either the restaurant or spa. The name of the spa and restaurant are also found in the local listing directories under different DBA's with the same phone number as the Hotel/Resort. For example: ABC Resort - 1-234-567-8901 Spa Cuts - 1-234-567-8901 (same address as ABC Resort) The Spa - 1-234-567-8901 ) same address as ABC Resort) Will this phone number that is used by the 3 separate entities penalize the Google listing placements for the actual Hotel/Resort in Google Places? Thanks everyone!
Technical SEO | | hawkvt10 -
How to disallow google and roger?
Hey Guys and girls, i have a question, i want to disallow all robots from accessing a certain root link: Get rid of bots User-agent: * Disallow: /index.php?_a=login&redir=/index.php?_a=tellafriend%26productId=* Will this make the bots not to access any web link that has the prefix you see before the asterisk? And at least google and roger will get away by reading "user-agent: *"? I know this isn't the standard proceedure but if it works for google and seomoz bot we are good.
Technical SEO | | iFix0