Google upgrades Search Appliance

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New version has improved features

By Eric Lai | Framingham | Monday, 18 August, 2008

Google has announced a new version of its enterprise-oriented Google Search Appliance that it says can index up to 10 million documents in a single box — up from three million previously — while also giving IT managers more control over the search results that end users see.

For instance, the new version lets IT admins set pages with certain metadata, such as a particular author's name, to show up higher in search results. Or they can bias results so that engineers get pages that have particular keywords or come from certain data repositories, while marketers typing in the exact same search terms see different results, according to Nitin Mangtani, Google's lead product manager for enterprise search.

Google has also beefed up its policy features, enabling IT managers to create privileges and groups of users that map to an external group policy infrastructure technology such as Active Directory or LDAP, Mangtani says. Thus, an end user who lacks access privileges to a certain document can be blocked from even seeing it in the search results he gets.

In addition, the appliance's security features have been improved, Mangtani says. For instance, users can now can be invisibly logged in and given the appropriate group policy access rights via Kerberos authentication.

Google now claims to have a total of 20,000 customers for all three of its enterprise search products, including the Google Search Appliance, the lower-end Google Mini appliance and its Google Site Search hosted service.

Meanwhile, start-ups such as Powerset, which is now owned by Microsoft, claim that their semantic search capabilities, designed to interpret the grammar of search requests submitted by users, are superior to what Google has to offer.

Mangtani declined to comment on semantic search or say whether Google has any ongoing efforts in that area. He contends, though, that the Google Search Appliance's improved ability to let IT control search results, and its support for letting users post successful search results for others to see, are examples of personalisation and "social search" capabilities that are unique to Google.

On criticism that the Google appliance is weak in its support for searching unstructured data, such as Excel spreadsheets, Mangtani says Google will continue to rely on connectors built internally and by third parties to enable users to search specialised content repositories. For instance, Google doesn't offer a connector to Lotus Notes data, but vendor Persistent Systems does.

As part of that strategy, Mangtani adds, instead of trying to enable the Google Search Appliance to translate a search request into, say, a Cognos business intelligence query, Google will continue to improve the system's ability to return relevant, already-created Cognos reports higher in the search results that a user sees.

Another new feature is the ability for end users to create alerts so that new results of specific pre-defined search requests are automatically sent to them via email. Alerts that would be sent via RSS feeds may be available later, Mangtani says.