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The company said that as part of its ongoing attempt to gain international market share, it had launched a new advertising offering for Europe called "AdWords." Initially, the service will be available to prospective UK advertisers. Google is the number four Web property in the UK and claims to have 7.7 million users there.
AdWords is a programme that lets advertisers purchase search terms that are closely related to products or services the advertiser sells. For example, a search for the term "flowers" on currently brings ups ads for on-line flower retailers www.coasttocoastflowers.com, www.natural-link.co.uk and others, in coloured boxes separate from the normal results in a Google search. Advertisers pay for the ad only when someone clicks on the link.
The service is one that Google has been selling in the US for over a year, and Google has reportedly tested the service in Europe with Expedia.co.uk and Comet.co.uk, two popular Web sites based in the UK.
Privately owned Google, which claims to have been profitable for the past 18 months, says that more than half its 150 million daily visitors come from outside the US. In Europe, the company will be competing with long-time rival Overture Services, which has been selling advertising products in Europe for over two years and currently operates in the UK, Germany and France.
In a separate announcement on Monday, Google said it would soon introduce a new mid-range hardware and software appliance aimed at corporate users that allows them to search the annals of their corporate networks.
The appliance, called the GB-5005, is a multi-server system that indexes up to 3 million documents, and it comes alongside Google's already launched GB-1001 and GB-8008 hardware products, which index 150,000 and 7 million documents respectively. The new product features security and performance enhancements and will let companies search a wide variety of document formats, including e-mail, spreadsheets, PDFs, HTML, text and word files.
As with its new advertising program in the UK, the US-based firm is looking to further diversify its scope as it pushes into the corporate search arena, which is set to become increasingly lucrative as companies continue to amass billions of gigabytes of data but have no easy way to retrieve the information. Google did not give a price for the new product, although the 1001 and 8008 models of the appliance sell for around USD28,000 and USD250,000 respectively.
The company said the product could be tested on a 30-day try-before-you-buy basis, and that existing users of Google corporate search appliances include ActivBiotics, ConocoPhillips, New York University, Seattle University, Societe Generale and even Irish company Riverdeep.
"The Google search appliance takes the hassle and expense out of organising corporate information," said Jonathan Rosenberg, Google's vice president of product management. "Google is applying its innovative search technology to the difficult challenge of making corporate information access simple."
Still, as a relative latecomer in this sector, Google will be competing with Inktomi, Convera, Verity and Autonomy, who sell similar devices and software products. In fact, on the same day Google unveiled the GB-5005, California-based InQuira rolled out new versions of its industry-specific dictionaries for self-service corporate searches.
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