As a way of diversifying - this time exploiting its core competency - and bringing in still more money, Google wants to sell SMBs a way for visitors to search their sites.

It calls the hosted, extranet service Custom Search Business Edition and is offering it for $100 a year for 5,000 pages and $500 a year for 50,000 pages.

Google claims it can have a guy signed up online and running in 10 minutes and that appears to include refinements like sectional groupings.

The widgetry is a development of the free, ads-based Google Custom Search Engine that it introduced last October, adding business integration features through an XML API, turning off the Adwords ads and offering the user a more customized look-and-feel as well as e-mail and phone support. It also reports on what people looked for.

It's sort of the poor man's $30,000 Google Search Appliance or $2,000 Google Mini, which offer additional control over crawl depth and time as well as secure access to internal documents.

Google is waiting for feedback before it tries making the service into an advertising vehicle.