Mountain View, California — Google’s enterprise drive continues with plans to link two of its more business-oriented products: The search engine company’s enterprise search hardware can now combine internal and external search indexes. It appears simple–and long overdue–but Google plans to introduce a new version of its Search Appliance that allows business users to find results within Google Apps and Google Sites, should you work for a company that uses Google’s office-productivity software and corporate search appliance.
The extraordinary yellow box (pictured below) that Google markets as the Google Search Appliance is now better than ever. The new edition, called “Cloud Connect,” released with several new features allows users to search Twitter and other Web sites from within their organization.
The company intends to release version 6.8 of its Google Search Appliance, a search server used by companies to index internal or Web-facing content. The software will only work with the 2U GB-7007, capable of indexing 10 million documents; and the GB-9009, which adds an additional 3 GB of storage.
Cloud Connect is definitely the main attraction here. It offers the capability to aggregate relevant search content from across the Web, Google Docs and Google Sites from a single search box, Google said. The service also allows users to search content from Twitter, blogs, and makes it all available to GSA users through a single interface.
Google’s latest Google Search Appliance can now find documents within a company’s Google Apps domain. (Credit: Google)
“The scope of an organization is not contained within the firewall anymore,” said Rajat Mukherjee, group product manager for Google’s enterprise search group, in a phone briefing.
Business information is all around, Mukherjee insists, so search systems need to reach across traditional boundaries.
The GSA upgrade also brings a new service called People Search, which helps present people-oriented information in search results. A post Google saw fit to release on both the Official Google Enterprise Blog and the Official Google Blog explained that this “delivers ‘universal search’ to another level, with more accessible business systems and content now spanning from cloud to ground.”
As for People Search, the post described that it “makes it easy to find experts and contact coworkers who are related to a search query, right from the search results page.” For instance, searching for “field marketing” would return a list of field marketing team members alongside other relevant content, Google said. The company also included an LDAP connector to help facilitate the process of creating a database of relevant employees; users can search via expertise and location as relevant fields.
Mukherjee says that Google’s goal with People Search is to encourage collaboration. In addition to helping people work together more effectively, Mukherjee mentioned that the GSA helps people save time. He cites a 2009 IDC study, “The Hidden Cost of Information Work,” which suggests that knowledge workers waste 25% of their time on tasks that could be made quicker through better search capabilities.
Finally, other new capabilities include Dynamic Navigation, which provides search result filtering, connectors to Sharepoint 2010 and LDAP data sources, and Active-Active Monitoring, a way to mirror data across servers for higher availability and redundancy.
These changes should help Google convince more than a few additional companies to invest in its little yellow box. Google named Delta Hotels and Legal Services of Northern California as organizations that have chosen Google Apps and the new technology, Google said.
Google Apps usage is still relatively modest although gaining traction at 3 million businesses, but Google has not released any details on the number of people using the Google Search Appliance. Also, if anyone is on the fence, it is possible some other upgrades are on the way, considering the new version of the Google Search Appliance is labeled 6.8 and 7.0 should be in the pipeline.