Google has just announced a new enterprise search service called Commerce Search. The name might remind you of Froogle, but this is not that kind of commerce/product search. With Commerce Search, Google has created what is essentially a shopping cart solution for online retailers.

Commerce Search, as Google describes it, promises to improve an e-commerce web site’s search and usability. It’s hosted on Google’s servers, and — like any good shopping cart software — offers a variety of customization options, including look and feel, product promotions, and more. Commerce Search also includes some Google search technologies like spellcheck, stemming, and synonym matching, and is integrated with Google Analytics by default.

When combined with Google Checkout — as shown in the introductory video (also embedded below) — this is nothing short of an all-inclusive e-commerce software package. Retailers upload their product data to Google, then customize the search/e-commerce options, and end up with a Google-hosted shopping cart. Pricing is based on how many products/SKUs in the retailer’s data feed, and how searches are done on the retailer’s store.

Here’s Google’s brief introductory video about Commerce Search.

Google has announced a beefed-up version of Google Custom Search, a site search product aimed at small and medium sized businesses. The new service is hosted by Google and offers all of the same functionality of the free Google Custom Search product, with a few key differences:

Customized search results. You can change the look and feel of search results to match the underlying design of a website, using a relatively straightforward XML API provided by Google.

Optional ads. With the free version of Google Custom Search, Google displays ads alongside search results. With the Business Edition, ads in search results are optional.

Dedicated enterprise support. The new service offers both email & phone support,

Optional Google branding. Don’t want the Google logo on your search results? You can easily turn it off.

Custom Search Business Edition starts at $100 a year for searching up to 5,000 pages and extends to $500 for 50,000 pages. Larger volumes of pages are supported through Google’s enterprise sales group. For smaller sites, businesses can sign up using a credit card for payment, and get a site search up and running quickly using a simple online interface.

To see an example of Google Custom Search Business Edition in action, see Holiday Home Rental, an online directory of 25,000 holiday rental homes with more than 150,000 pages of content. More information about the new service at the Google Custom Search Engine page.

The Google Enterprise Blog announced that they are getting out of the hardware business by partnering with Dell to manufacture their Google Search Appliance boxes.

Google said they made this move so that they can “focus more on the software side.” Google is also excited about Dell’s capabilities of marketing the search appliance globally.

The Google Enterprise Blog posted this commercial on their blog, showcasing some of the marketing Dell has already begun for the Google Search Appliance.

It is also important to note that Google and Dell have a search partnership already, installing Google software on all Dell personal computers.

As earlier reported this year, Google launched a premier edition of Google Apps which included email service, calendars, SSO services, instant messaging, spreadsheets, and more. One interesting detail of their recent promotions of Apps is how they’re pushing this out to schools, in both free and paid “premier” service options. This is particularly interesting in the context of all the commentary about how Google is really going head-to-head against Microsoft for marketshare in office applications.

Universities and colleges are typically always looking for ways to cut costs, and the Google Apps services are apparently very attractive to a number of them. Just the email service alone is nearly enough to get lots of universities to seriously consider outsourcing some of their IT work—10 gb storage per account with good uptime guarantees and no longer having to deal with the spam policing are enough to get many an educational IT administrator to salivate. The free, Educational Edition is really cool, too, even if it only offers 2 gb of email storage.

Doesn’t this educationally-targeted promotion campaign sound just the least bit familiar? Oh, that’s because Apple used to provide free or reduced-rate stuff to schools, starting way back in the eighties, in order to get impressionable young people to become dedicated lifelong consumers. That school promotion campaign of Apple’s was cited as being responsible for building a committed user following in the face of Microsoft’s growth, and it helped to drive Apple sales as parents sought to support their children’s education by purchasing computers for the home. Google’s now hopped onto a formula that could work at sliding the thin end of the wedge under Microsoft, and many universities are abuzz with talk about possibly integrating their apps to save on IT resources and money.

The Google Apps “poster child” is apparently Arizona State University, which is one of the earlier, largest public universities to adopt the service in favor of their own home-grown email system. ASU’s decision is being discussed by many other universities across the country after their deal was highlighted in Educause meetings and discussion email lists, as well as articles in campus newspapers all over.

ASU’s vice president and university technology officer, Adrian Sannier, commented about the deal: “We believe that strategic alliances with technology leaders like Google are key to accelerating the contribution that technology can make to ASU’s academic enterprise.”

The university’s press release doesn’t relate how much money they’ll save in man-hours and infrastructure costs from offloading the mail, not to mention how much they may save from using stuff like Google Docs & Spreadsheets instead of MicroSoft Word & Excel.

Microsoft also offers discounts on their software packages, but they don’t appear to’ve targeted the enterprise-wide end of the school equation in the way that Google now is doing.

Here’s a few more of the colleges and universities who are integrating with Google Apps (I linked to news stories or other info pages about each school’s use of Google, where possible):

• Abilene Christian University

• Aquinas College
• Cambria-Rowe Business College
• Concordia University – Saint Paul (pilot program)
• Faculty of Management Studies, Delhi University, India
• Hofstra University
• Kenyan & Rawandan universities
• Lakehead University
• Manhattan Christian College
• Northwestern University
• Politecnico Grancolombiano, Columbia
• San Jose City College
• South East European University, Macedonia
• St. Louis University
• Swarthmore College
• Thunderbird School of Global Management
• Trinity College
• Victoria Junior College, Singapore
• Wyzsza Szkola Biznesu – National Louis University, Poland

Some university IT departments are urging caution with turning over so much private data to an outside company, or voicing concerns about service levels compared with their dedicated in-house crews and more-established software packages, but many others appear to be just holding out in a wait-and-see mode (see Plymouth U, UC Irvine, and Arizona U), opting to observe how Google Apps implementations go for other universities before they decide if they’ll switch over.

I earlier mentioned that Google appeared to be planning to build out campus maps through the Sketchup contest, and the Google Apps deal seems to indicate an even larger overall strategy to woo the educational community over to Google and away from Microsoft. Google’s SiteSearch service has already been supporting university websites for many years, and their annual Summer of Code also helps to nurture future technical employees by targeting students.

Chris “Silver” Smith is Lead Strategist at Netconcepts, and a regular contributor to the Locals Only column which appears on Mondays at Search Engine Land.

News.com reports that Google is expected to release a new upgraded version of their Google Enterprise Search Appliances today. The new Google Mini will “enable companies to perform searches on intranets as well as internal business applications.” The search boxes are expected to be available for purchase as soon as they are announced. I will update this post when I hear about the product launch.

Update: Official press release just released. Updates to the Google Mini include:

(1) Secure Search (2) Google OneBox for Enterprise (3) Site Search Improvements

More details at mini.google.com.

A Google press release from yesterday announced that Google has added a few features to the Google Search Appliance. The new features clearly labeled include:

• Clustering of the results
• Source Biasing Options – define which sources are more authoritative than others
• Add languages such as French, Italian, German and Spanish and Portuguese for query stemming and synonyms dictionaries
• Auto-generate a sitemap for Google.com’s crawler
• Added security for NTLM version 2.0 authentication/authorization
• Open Source Connectors for Microsoft SharePoint

More details here.