Google Upgrades Enterprise Search Appliances

Google has announced two new enterprise search appliances that are geared towards helping businesses find needed information more easily, amid the vast data stores that businesses create.

The new Google Search Appliance Version 7.0 (GSA 7.0) boxes are the latest in a line of enterprise search products that Google has been offering for more than 10 years.

Enterprise Search

“You might be searching for last quarter’s sales goals, product launch materials or your colleague’s telephone number – but there isn’t one simple search box to help you find all the information you need,” Matthew Eichner, general manager of Google’s enterprise search unit wrote in an 9 October post on the Google Enterprise blog. “When 60 percent of corporate workers say that it’s hard to find information within their organization, something needs to change.”

The new Google GSA 7.0 appliances include a myriad of new features, according to the blog post, including:

• Document preview allows users to view thumbnails and flip through full-screen document previews right alongside search results.
• Google Translate in which secure and automatic translations display in search results, in more than 60 languages. This feature makes it easier for users to find and use content in multiple languages.
• Updated language capabilities to improve search results for inquiries involving Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean content.
• A sleeker, updated new interface.
• A smaller physical footprint: A single rack of GSAs can now be configured to hold the equivalent of 1 billion pages of data, which equals the entire search contents of Google.com back in 2000.

“You can stack them and scale them out” as needed, Eichner said in an 9 October telephone interview.

For users, one of the biggest advantages of the GSA 7.0 appliances is that they can help sift through content to provide the core material that businesses are seeking when they are searching their data repositories, said Eichner.

Intranet Mining

The appliances can find information stored anywhere in an organisation, from desktop computers to smartphones or tablets, according to Google. In addition, content can be added from secure storage, cloud services, or the public Web and social networking sites.

Another new feature of the GSA 7.0 appliances is that they now provide Google-quality search for Microsoft’s SharePoint 2010, giving users the ability to find needed content within a core enterprise application. The appliances allow users to search all content within SharePoint 2010 directly from the SharePoint user interface.

The Google Search Appliances start at $15,000 (£9,368) per year for 500,000 documents, based on a licensing agreement for two to three years, according to Google.

The devices support search for more than 220 file formats, including HTML, Microsoft Office, PDF, PostScript, WordPerfect and Lotus.

One of the keys to the new appliances is that they contain machine-learning algorithms that have been tuned with the billions of daily queries on Google.com so that they can deliver the most relevant search results, according to Google.

The new appliance offering is the latest enterprise search appliance news from Google in the last several months. In July, Google announced the demise of its Google Mini enterprise search appliance line due to poor sales.

The Google Mini appliances were released to help companies create an effective new search feature for internal use or to help a Web-based company offer a more responsive or more advanced query corner for its audience, according to an earlier eWEEK report. The Minis could index 200,000 and 300,000 documents, costing $6,000 (£3,747) and $9,000 (£5,621), respectively. The original Mini, introduced in 2005, cost $3,000 (£1,874) and could handle up to 100,000 documents.

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