Google Inc. recently announced their offering to run the search engines of small web sites starting from $100 per year. This service is targeted at the million of Web sites that either wish to have search engine capability on their site or are not satisfied with the quality of their current search results.

The price for Google’s ‘Custom Search Business Edition’ will start at $100 per year to comb through upto 5,000 Web pages. Larger websites upto 50,000 pages will have to pay $500 annually to avail of this service. That’s a substantial discount from the fees that Google has been charging for the scaled-down versions of its leading search engine “Google Mini” which was introduced two years ago has a base price of $1,995.

Google has been offering a free version of custom search engine since last October to Web sites willing to show relevant sponsored ads by Google. However, Web sites that use the new business edition will be able to block Google’s ads. Also, the search results will be displayed on the customer’s own Web site.

This move by Google is the company’s latest attempt to make money by licensing its search technology to millions of potential users. However, software licensing currently accounts for just one percent of $22 billion in revenue since its IPO. It would be interesting to see how Google develops new sources of revenue in time to come.

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