Mountain View, California — Search engine behemoth Google Inc is intensifying it campaigns to impregnate one of its latest and technically sophisticated product called Google Search Appliance 6.0 (GSA), which it claims would allow businesses to perform Google-type searches on billions of documents.
It is not surprising that Google sells hardware, too, and on Tuesday unveiled its new Google Search Appliance, the GB-9009, which can index up to 30 million documents, according to Google. Its minimum capacity is 15 million documents.
Google’s latest internal corporate search tool, the Google Search Appliance 6.0. (Credit: Google)
That is an astounding increase from the last version, which empowers customers to search up to 10 million documents. And that improvement is not just because Google made the individual search appliances more powerful — though it is offering a new, higher-end search appliance for searching up to 30 million documents.
The latest version is all about measuring, or the ability to connect dozens of these appliances to support even the largest organizations with strict technology requirements and at small businesses that may not even have Web sites to search their networks for presentations, spreadsheets, and other documents, respectively.
The move comes amid Google’s diminishing double-digit percentage levels, amid a challenging economic environment and a sharp industry-wide slowdown in the advertising spending that it depends on.
Google’s latest version of its Search Appliance, first introduced in 2001, projected to cater the high-end of the market.
The sleek yellow boxes, based on hardware from Dell Inc and Intel Corp, come loaded with Google software and allow companies to harness Google’s search capabilities to cull through their own internal documents.
The actual breakthrough is what Google has dubbed “GSA to the n” (i.e., Google Search Appliance to the nth power) architecture, which allows multiple search appliances to be connected in a single, unified environment.
There are two separate hardware models that are capable of searching different numbers of documents: the “GB 7007,” which can search between 500,000 and 10 million documents, and the high-end “GB-9009” can index 30 million documents by itself and reach into the billions if a company connects several appliances together.
The GB-9009 replaces the GB-8008, which, had to be hard-wired and pre-configured on 12 server nodes to provide the capacity of the new system, said Nitin Mangtani, senior product manager of enterprise search at Google.
The GB-9009 appliance is based on Dell’s PowerEdge R710 rack server platform, which runs Intel Xeon 5500 Series processors. Unlike the predecessor single-box Search Appliance models, the GB-9009 has two units: one for processing and one for storage.
The goal is to make search the “unifying glue” across an organization’s various departments, Mangtani said.
Mangtani said the entry-level 7007 model costs $30,000, including two years of support. Google does not disclose pricing on the 9009 model but notes that the price is less than the 7007 on a price-per-document basis.