According to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), Google is trying new ways to win over business customers with its latest attempt involving helping companies dig out search results that are buried deep within their own Web sites.

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The WSJ report said that Google has unveiled “several upgrades to an existing service that helps businesses expand the information customers see when they search for products and information on their Web sites”.

Businesses can customise the search results based on factors like date and can also choose to have specific pages – like pages from a product catalog – appear higher in rankings, says the report.

That would be a bonus for appliance manufacturers to show online customers the replacement part or car companies give more details to customers browsing for model information. Pricing starts at $US100 a year- virtually nothing in business terms.
And says the WSJ, the sweet spot for businesses here is that while providers like Microsoft offer similar search-enhancing services, many of them require hardware and up front costs.

Google Site Search on the other hand can be implemented by just cutting and pasting some code onto a Web site – another implementation of the company’s ‘cloud computing’ theory.

Google which has firmly lined itself up to take on Microsoft and steal corporate business from under the software giants nose, continues to tout potential benefits of Web-powered applications like the ability to collaborate in real-time and of course the overall cost savings.

However says the report, “many corporations remain skeptical that Google’s offerings, which leverage its massive infrastructure to offer services like email and word processing with little or no hardware, can match the features and reliability of services they’ve been using for years”.