Google is launching a new service designed to let website publishers build their own search engines using Google’s massive index of page links.

The Google Custom Search Engine service will let anyone, from individuals to organisations, put a Google-powered search box on their websites that only searches certain sites and pages. That way, the publisher of a website about hockey for example, could put a search box on his home page that only returns links to pages about that sport that he hand-picked. The service will also let publishers have a search engine that taps Google’s index in full but gives preference to results from websites they have pre-selected.

With Custom Search Engine, Google joins others that provide similar services, including Yahoo and Rollyo. These custom engines are part of the social search concept, which taps users to refine the search engine experience by contributing, categorizing, tagging and sharing search results. For example, site publishers using the Google service can let others contribute to their custom index.

Designed to be extremely easy and intuitive to use, the service will let site publishers build their own search engine in a matter of minutes through the use of menus and wizards, Google’s vice-president of search products and user experience, Marissa Mayer, said.

The service is hosted on Google servers, so site publishers don’t get access to search query logs, a sensitive topic for users who are concerned about the privacy of their search activities. However, the entire search experience happens in the publishers’ sites, and they can personalise the search results page so that its layout is in tune with the rest of their pages, Mayer said. Google will display contextual ads with search results, but sites run by government agencies, nonprofit organisations and universities can opt out of this.

Google stood to benefit not only from sharing ad revenue with publishers but also from propagating the availability of its search engine, analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence, Greg Sterling, said.

“People are doing searches on all kinds of websites, not just search engines,” he said. “Search has become the Web’s navigational paradigm.”

Meanwhile, there was considerable demand from publishers for custom search engines because they realised that providing that capability made their websites more attractive to their visitors, Sterling said.

The new service will become available Monday night (US time) at http://www.google.com/coop/cse

When Google talks, people listen. Therefore, when Google offers alternatives to Microsoft, it is prudent to consider their impact. Google Docs & Spreadsheets, now in beta, is a multipronged assault on Fortress Microsoft.

The service provides documents and spreadsheets, and while many users also need presentation capabilities — if only occasionally — there’s no question these are the two main pillars of office usage.

As to be expected, Docs & Spreadsheets is an online service. The docs part came from Google’s purchase of Upstartle and its Writely online collaboration service with the spreadsheet component developed internally at Google Labs.

Having another office option causes us to examine, once again, how much is enough — and having it available online leads to a comparison with Microsoft’s Office Live online offering.

I’ve lost count of the number of applications that can open and manipulate .doc files on Windows, Linux, Mac or live on the Web. And though each has limitations, the more alternatives that are available the less the limitations seem to matter.

Return to your youth for a moment and conjure up a vision of the overlapping circles of the Venn diagrams you learned about in school.

Think of each circle representing a Microsoft Office alternative overlapping where they share a common feature or function. Each newcomer duplicates what it believes is the core set of functions required to be viable. While there will be differences among vendors, there will be a significant overlap as each vendor opts for the most significant functions.

As users, if we can confine ourselves to this core set of functions, we have documents that are almost universally accessible. This is a strong motivation to reduce the features and functions we use in building our Office documents.

Moving to the online element, Microsoft Office Live is much more. Its two fee-based offerings, Live Essentials and Live Collaboration, appear to overlap the basic Docs & Spreadsheets functions but really seem to be focused on attracting businesses that want to outsource not only their Web site hosting but also hosting of business applications and storage. Office Live appears to be a true software-as-a-service offering.

So, while a direct comparison is probably not appropriate, it is worthwhile to understand what Google’s Docs & Spreadsheets can bring you — especially because it is free.

You can move, copy and save documents easily from your local machine to your Google storage and convert them to, say, PDF, RTF or OpenOffice in the process. You can e-mail them to a special version of your GMail address and a few minutes later there they are online. Collaboration with other GMail users is just a click away.

So while Docs & Spreadsheets isn’t likely to cause tremors in the corporate IT world, small/midsize business and corporate users might, as they have in the past, start a grass-roots movement in this direction. Enterprise architects would do well to have a look for themselves.