Google on Monday released a new version of its search product for enterprises. The software giant is unveiling version 6.8 of the Google Search Appliance, or GSA, which offers customizable search functionality for an intranet or web site.
GSA 6.8’s new features include Cloud Connect, for searches that are integrated with Google Apps, Site Search, and Twitter, and People Search, for searching profile information related to a business’ employees. Dynamic Navigation filters results according to metadata attributes, and Active-Active can direct search traffic to more than one appliance to avoid congestion. Searching any content within SharePoint 2010 is a built-in capability.
Wasting Up To 25 Percent
Google has pointed to studies showing that information-based workers waste as much as 25 percent of their time on work that could be more efficient if they had better search.
Existing customers can obtain the update as a download. Indexes for internal and external searches can be combined into a single, universal interface that combines results — from documents and databases, content-management systems, web sites, and other sources. Google told news media that a firewall is not a limit to the scope of searches, since information sought by businesses can be anywhere.
Cloud Connect, for instance, collects search results from various sources inside and outside the enterprise, and from social-networking sites, all controlled via a single interface. Drill-down searches can be conducted on the results, using metadata criteria.
The software is designed to work with the Google-issued 2U GB-7007 box, or the higher-capacity GB-2009. The Search Appliance, first released in 2002, was targeted at companies from the beginning to fill business needs for finding documents that were not accessed by Google’s main web crawler.
Improvements in People Search could be particularly useful to a large enterprise. A user could search for a given skill or job description, and the results…