A Feature Comparison with Google’s Custom Search (CSBE)

Google offers a custom search for business, similar to the service Aspect Search provides. This feature comparison chart will give you an indication of how these two services compare. We have summarized this feature comparison in a conclusion below.

	Google's CSBE	Aspect Search
Site index can be scheduled for a specific time You can schedule Aspect Search to crawl your site daily or weekly at a specific (local) time. For example, your product catalogue is updated once a week on a Sunday night. You can schedule Aspect's robot to start the crawl of your site after these updates have been made to ensure your index is up to date.
Entire site is indexed with each crawl Aspect Search guarantees that all of your publicly accessible web pages will be indexed with each crawl. Google does not provide any guarantee of when and how much of your site will be indexed.
Statistics and a report provided from each index Aspect Search provides a report of each index made against your site. This report shows you server errors and missing files (404s) allowing you to proactively track down potential errors with your site.
Uses stemming technology Stemming allows variants of a word to be matched during a users search allowing for a broader search.
Pages can be blocked from indexing We have added extensions to the robot.txt protocol to allow pages to be blocked, or only follow links using URL patterns. This is configured on our server so no changes are required in your website code. Google uses URL Patterns to specify which areas of a site you want included or excluded in your search.
User defined stop words and go words You can configure a custom list of stop and go words which allow you fine control over which words are added into your index.
Customize the search results Aspect Search allows you full control of the style and layout of the search results. Google allows style (color, fonts etc) changes allow, not structure.	limited
Xml feeds of search results Both services provide the search results in an xml format accessible through an API.
Dynamic IFRAME support for hosting the search results page Display the results of a users search in the host page of the originating site giving the impression the results are being displayed from your site.
Host a search results page on behalf of the customer Aspect Search provides the option of hosting a search results page on our own servers. This option can be used if you are concerned about browser compatibility with the IFRAME solution.
Provide index hints You can define keywords using the meta keywords tag to supply a hint to the Aspect Search algorithm. This can be useful for sites that have not been optimized for search engines.
Word suggestion on misspelled words Provide spelling suggestions on misspelled words.
Display custom data within a search result Aspect Search provides the facility to inject additional pieces of information to a search result. For example, a picture, price or a “Buy Now” link can be easily added to your search results.
Reports on what people are searching for Both services provide statistics on what search phrases people are searching for.

Conclusion

The feature that really separates Google's CSBE and Aspect Search is the customization of the search results. We aim to make sure your search results do not look like an Aspect Search result page, or any other client of ours. We want visitors to your site to think the results are being served directly from your site, so the results should fit seamlessly into your pages. Although Google allows you to customize the style (color's, fonts etc) of the results, the structure will look like any other Google generated search result.

Aspect is dedicated specifically to the site search space, and our focus is on tailor made search solutions for each client, to suit their individual needs. We offer a level of personal service a huge corporation is simply unable to provide.

Our aim is to provide a relevant, fast and customizable hosted search. As we are focused on providing search for individual sites, we are flexible to your needs. If you require a feature we do not currently provide we are more than happy to consider adding this into our product.

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