Outlook Series | Google Touts New Search Appliance

Google Touts New Search Appliance

August 07, 2008

Google touted an all-new version of the Google Search Appliance integrated hardware and software solution, with a new architecture that can index all of an organization's content—up to 10 million documents—in a single box.

"It is now easier than ever for companies to give all employees a Google.com search experience inside their business," said Dave Girouard, president of Enterprise for Google. "With the improved architecture for the search appliance, businesses can provide secure search across the largest enterprise content repositories—such as Documentum, Filenet, LiveLink, and Sharepoint—all from one easy-to-maintain appliance."

Typical enterprise search solutions require several servers (such as multiple front-end web servers, index servers and database servers), each of which need to be separately maintained.

For large volumes of content, a traditional implementation might require 10 or more servers. As content in an organization grows, the effort to maintain the investment in hardware and software becomes exponentially more costly and time consuming—demanding increasing numbers of servers along with the additional personnel to manage and configure them.

The new Google Search Appliance—Google's iconic yellow box that provides universal search capabilities across an organization's content—is designed to make it easy to deploy and administer enterprise-wide search, even as content grows. The scalable architecture and core relevancy algorithms used by the Google Search Appliance ensure users get a high quality search experience across more enterprise content.

"We were invited to participate in the beta program for the new Google Search Appliance and were extremely pleased with its simplified deployment architecture," says Renée Nocker, Director of Enterprise Business Intelligence for Kimberly-Clark. "Being able to search 10 million documents in a box not only makes maintenance and deployment across our domestic and international locations much easier, but we also get the same fast, reliable and relevant search results we've come to expect from Google."

In addition to capacity and performance improvements, the new Google Search Appliance offers improved search quality, enhanced personalization, security and language support.

Capacity and Performance

Indexes 10 million documents in a single appliance – A new architectural design that takes advantage of improvements in hardware and software increases the single appliance index capacity to 10 million documents.

Improved Search Quality and More Personal Experience for Users

Search across all enterprise content – Universal search capabilities for secure access to web servers, portals, file shares, databases, real-time business data, and enterprise content systems including EMC Documentum, IBM FileNet, OpenText Livelink, and Microsoft SharePoint.
Personalization – New scoring policies allow administrators to adjust search results for different user groups, based on department or function. For example, engineers can choose to receive code and design documents at the top of their result set, while results for the marketing department can favor marketing documents.
Advanced Biasing – Administrators can now bias results based on metadata (in addition to biasing based on source, URL or date). For example, administrators can promote one type of document (such as 'Whitepaper') over others (such as 'Log file').
Alerts – Employees can subscribe to email alerts for topics and documents of interest, choosing an hourly, daily, or weekly alert schedule.
Advanced reporting – The search appliance now offers advanced search analytics for every query, including reports on which queries receive no clicks by a user and how often users are clicking on sponsored links in comparison to organic search results or OneBox modules.
Enterprise Labs Search Innovation – The Google Enterprise Labs™ site gives businesses early access to the latest search experiments in order to evaluate and provide feedback. Recent innovations include Do-It-Yourself Keymatches, Search-As-You-Type and Google Sites Integration.

Enhanced Security and Language Support

Native Support for Kerberos – Google Search Appliance supports Kerberos to provide single authentication for Sharepoint, file shares and non-Windows-based content systems, in addition to Windows-based systems.
International Expansion – International support expanding to include: administrative functions in four new languages (English-UK, Portuguese-Portugal, Turkish, Vietnamese); contextual spell checking for all end users in Portuguese, French, Italian, German, Spanish, and Dutch; and contextual query expansion for all end users in Dutch.

"For us, choosing an enterprise search solution came down to two factors: getting the quickest and most relevant search results. Not only does the Google Search Appliance deliver fast and relevant results, but our employees and agents don't need anything more technical than a few keywords to find what they need," said Kenneth Hittel, VP Corporate Internet, New York Life Insurance Company. "And the new personalization, biasing, and alert features represent the type of user-focused innovation that makes the Google Search Appliance a good fit for our agents and for our organization."

The Google Search Appliance is available in a variety of standard configurations with capacities from 500,000 to 30M documents. Custom configurations in excess of 30 million are available upon request.