Small businesses will be able to have a search function on their websites for as little as £49 a year after Google announced it would make its search technology available to the SME market.

The global search engine claims the new service will allow small companies with up to 5,000 pages to provide a search facility to visitors without the need to run ads for Google.

Larger companies with bigger websites will be able to have access to the system for a fee in the region of £250.

“If you have a website, we already crawl your site,” claimed Google Enterprise product manager Nitin Mangtani. “Now we are saying you don’t have to manage search within your site.”

Mangtani claims small companies will be able to tailor the system to their exact requirements in just 10 minutes.