For many years as a consultant, when a small business said they wanted a site search engine, I was flummoxed. The best site search option was clearly Google, but it was ugly (you had very little control over the appearance of the search results) and, of course, laden with text ads. I generally settled with a premier version of Atomz, but the quality of the search was fairly mediocre.

I’m pretty stunned that it took this long for Google to offer it (given the obvious demand), but here we are! Google is now officially offering “Google Enterprise: Google Custom Search Business Edition” (they are clearly taking their cue from Microsoft on product naming… Sheesh). “Custom Search Business Edition turns off Google Adwords advertisements in search results that regularly appear in the free version of the Custom Search Engine. If you wish to significantly change the look and feel of your search engine, you can build your own user interface and integrate an XML feed of search results.”

Before you get scared off by the name (“Oh no! Enterprise?!”), here’s the pricing rundown:

* Search less than 5,000 web pages: $100 per year
* Search less than 50,000 web pages: $500 per year
* Search less than 100,000 web pages: $850 per year
* Search less than 300,000 web pages: $2250 per year

I honestly think they are shooting themselves in the foot a bit with the high end pricing (I think they could charge a lot more), but it’s nice to see some small-biz-friendly pricing on the low end.

Of course, a big problem remains here… If I build my own non-google search engine, I can make the results pages happily spiderable and they’ll get indexed by Google (which means a swath of resulting organic traffic). If my results pages are generated by Google, I’m darn sure I can’t talk them into indexing them and treating them like high quality content pages.