Hoping to become less dependent on Internet advertising, online search engine leader Google Inc. is introducing a tool designed to make it easier for companies and their workers to find vital information scattered across a maze of complex software applications.
Google Inc. has recently unveiled two enterprise search products–a Google Search Appliance and a next-generation Google Mini–targeted at large enterprises and small organizations, respectively.
Google, the consumer Web search favorite, with these offerings, will help office workers dig deeper into business software programs and databases to find relevant information tidbits, the company said in a statement.
The Mountain View, California Company seeks to answer criticism that its basic keyword system of searching for information on the public Web is too blunt an instrument to cut through complex office filing systems to find salient details.
Google introduced a new version of its system to trawl for information locked inside an organization’s key business systems, working with software makers including Oracle Corp., Salesforce.com and Cisco Systems.
The Google Search Appliance integrates Google’s OneBox technology that will allow companies to offer search shortcuts to commonly asked questions across their business applications, such as corporate contact directory, customer resource management and financial programs.
The new feature, known by the mouthful "Google OneBox for Enterprise," is built into boxes Google sells to businesses. They help create custom search systems for employees inside organizations or for consumers on the company’s own Web site.
"Google is becoming more and more savvy about what the enterprise needs in the way of search," said IDC analyst Sue Feldman, an expert in the enterprise search field.
"It is taking commodity search, adding features, and making search more appealing" for business users, she said.
The latest upgrade to Google’s 4-year-old search engine for corporate America underscores Google’s determination to develop other revenue channels besides advertising, traditionally a volatile market vulnerable to unpredictable swings in spending.
With the improvement unveiled, Google’s corporate search engine will be able to fish through a deep pool of data and display the requested information in a box near the top of the computer screen so users would not have to scan through other pages.
This "one box" approach is similar to the system that Google deploys at its own Web site whenever visitors are looking for information about local weather forecasts or stock market quotes. In those instances, Google’s search engine provides a snapshot of requested information at the top of the results page.
While Google lacks the sophistication of systems that have long focused on the corporate search market — from suppliers like Autonomy, Fast Search and Transfer and IBM — Google is quickly making in-roads, Feldman said.
Google plans to allow corporate customers to create company-specific searches where employees can use the familiar Google search box to locate information such as contacts or calendars, employee benefits, sales leads or purchase orders.
"Over time Google has become a gateway for searching for all types of information," said Dave Girouard, general manager of the company’s enterprise business. "We have been doing this on the consumer side for years," he said.
Already, when a consumer goes to http://www.google.com and types in a query for certain types of information, Google analyzes the request to figure out if it may refer to, say, a song or airline flight times, the weather or stock prices.
The seeming simplicity of Google disguises how different search terms whisk a user into entirely different databases.
The move to customize how Google hardware searches inside popular software applications comes as the Search Appliance nears sales to its 4,000th customer, nearly double the 2,000 customers it counted in 2005’s third quarter, Girouard said.
A company could set up a hundred different categories of custom searches for documents inside their organizations, with specific queries targets to particular employee groups.
To make the tool work for corporate search, Google teamed with several other leading makers of business software. The Google OneBox for Enterprise includes functions developed with partners such as Oracle Corp., Cisco Systems Inc., Salesforce.com Inc., NetSuite Inc., Cognos Inc., SAS Institute Inc. and Employease Inc.
Cisco, for example, is integrating its MeetingPlace Express technology with Google’s appliance, while Oracle is providing access to human resources, customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning applications via the Oracle E-Business suite.
Employease, another Google partner, will offer on-demand human resources information, ranging from employee data to benefits to recruitment and performance information.
The collaboration reflects Google’s desire to play a much larger role in the business software market, said Whit Andrews, a research vice president for Gartner Inc. Google’s ability to "work well with other software vendors will be absolutely critical to its success" in the corporate market, Andrews said. "That ability has not seemed to be in Google’s DNA."
Google has had limited success peddling its business software so far.
In 2005, Google collected less than $75 million from software licenses, a blip in its total revenue of $6.1 billion. Advertising currently accounts for 99 percent of Google’s revenue.
"We are certainly much smaller than the mother ship, but we are doubling in size every year and are profitable," said Girouard.
The corporate search market remains relatively small, generating less than $350 million annually, Gartner estimates. The major players in the field currently include Autonomy Inc., Fast Search & Transfer and IBM Corp.
Google will promote use of the new search feature by providing open access to developers to download the software, create new applications and share them with other developers.
In order to jump start use of its search software inside business, government and other private organizations, Google has worked with consulting partners such as BearingPoint and Persistent Systems to provide access to commonly used applications from SAP AG, Oracle’s PeopleSoft, Microsoft Exchange and IBM’s Lotus Notes.
Meanwhile, the new Google Mini is targeted at small businesses and is faster and half the size and weight of the original Mini. It costs just less than $2,000.
Pricing for the Google Search Appliance, which also has improved security and performance over the company’s previous Search Appliance, starts at $30,000, Google said.
If Google signs up more corporate search customers, it may open the door for the company to sell other software applications, such as its e-mail service and recently launched calendar service, CEO Eric Schmidt said in an interview. Schmidt described Google’s corporate search engine as "a strategic beachhead for solving interesting problems" in corporate America.
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