Business & Money Trail:

GOOGLE TO OFFER NEW SEARCH PRODUCT FOR COMPANIES

As reported by Andrea Orr, Google, which operates a popular Internet search engine, unveiled a new corporate search product to help companies locate documents within their own databases.

By expanding into the corporate search business, Mountain View, Calif.-based Google joins a number of companies including Verity Inc, Ask Jeeves Inc and CMGI Inc's AltaVista that are also selling enterprise software. What makes Google different is that it is selling search hardware and software, all contained in a slim device it calls the Google Search Appliance, which businesses can install behind their own corporate firewalls and program to scan whichever documents they wish.

Google said the Search Appliance is capable of scanning a host of documents from personnel records to corporate literature, engineers' computer code and even employee emails. However, it said individual companies will be able to determine the parameters of the in-house searches in conducts.

The move into this corporate search business comes at a time when many companies are struggling with how to locate all their internal documents. It also offers Google the opportunity to develop a new revenue stream based on selling a product. Google's core consumer search business is free and is funded largely by advertising.

"Companies have a lot of content behind the firewall and struggle with how to get access to all that content to make employees more productive," said Joan Braddi, vice president of search services at Google.

"This is an extension of our Internet site search business. Many of our Web site customers have been asking us, 'Can you give me Google in a box?'"

Google said it has already sold "several" of the Internet appliances and counts among its customers National Semiconductor Corp. The product comes in two versions; one that sells for $20,000 and scales to search up to 150,000 documents and a more powerful version for $250,000, which Google says can scan "millions and millions" of documents.

As with its consumer search product, Google maintains it can offer a superior corporate search product by providing better relevance and listing the most important documents at the top of the search results.