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Google is to allow businesses to customise what search results visitors receive when searching for information within their own sites.

The world’s most popular search engine will expand its existing service, the online news agency Reuters reports.

Visitors who search within a particular company’s website will receive customised results not typical to Google.com that could include previously untracked information from the firm’s own site.

The new service does not have to be installed or maintained independently but is hosted on the network of Google computers.

Custom Search Business Edition, which was launched in 2006, will be renamed Site Search and will integrate the new functions.

A product manager at Google’s Enterprise division, Nitin Mangtani, told Reuters that the extended system was aimed at businesses and governments that wanted to feature search without advertisements.

In related news, Loren Baker, editor of Search Engine Journal, has given tips on how to increase search engine optimisation (SEO).

He advised that without incoming links or SEO basics, websites would ‘probably not even rank at all’.

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The popularity of web 2.0 in the consumer marketplace will wane and die according to a UK web testing firm.

Concerns about placing online advertisements alongside “questionable content” was a primary reason for vendors to stop using the format, stated the research firm SciVisum.

“Retailers will focus on eliminating the background problems that plague their websites and affect sales,” said Deri Jones, chief executive of SciVisum.

Researchers found that a high number of users encountered problems while surfing the net, leading to a fall in user confidence levels.

Some one in three online users were found to result in more than three per cent error rates, with more than ten per cent of users having extreme inconsistencies in delivery speed.

In order for businesses to keep demand up for this type of platform, researchers concluded that firms will be forced to form stricter e-commerce operations in order to see profits.

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Trojan malware has been found to be controlling Google ad space by sending users to different websites when they try to click on the search engine’s advertisements.

Romanian-based online security firm BitDefender found the hidden software, Trojan.Qhost.WU, and said that the threat could have a negative impact on both users and businesses.

Attila-Mihaly Balazs, a BitDefender virus analyst, said that users are prone to clicking on links or ads that “may contain malicious code”, while he said webmasters are affected because their valuable ad space is stolen by a third-party vendor and are used to promote someone else’s website.

An anonymous hacker who told siliconrepublic.com about how the malware could be operating said “most anti-virus” programs should pick up on the problem if “if an attempt was made to modify the host file anyway”.

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