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Google Upgrades Search Appliance
Friday, July 09, 2004
The Google Search Appliance is a simple engine designed to help
companies manage their internal and external content without a lot
of headaches. It installs quickly and can handle 1.5 million documents,
which is five times its predecessor's capacity, according to Dave
Girouard, general manager of the enterprise group at Google.
Google last week released a new version of its enterprise search
product, an appliance built with the same code base and content-crawling
technology as the software that runs the company's public Webwide
search site, Google.com.
The Google Search Appliance is a simple engine designed to help
companies manage their internal and external content without a lot
of headaches. It installs quickly and can handle 1.5 million documents,
which is five times its predecessor's capacity, according to Dave
Girouard, general manager of the enterprise group at Google.
It's also faster: Google increased the appliance's query performance
fivefold, from 60 queries per minute to 300 queries per minute,
he says.
First Major Upgrade
The appliance is the first major upgrade of Google Search Appliance,
which debuted in 2002. Back then, the company also offered enterprise
customers a hosted search service, giving companies a choice to
deploy their own Google appliance or let Google's service run the
search engine for their sites.
But the company no longer offers its hosted search service, Girouard
says. The appliance gives users tighter control over which content
is crawled and indexed than the service did, and better reporting
features for tracking usage, he says.
To save bandwidth, Google Search Appliance now operates in a continuous
crawl mode and only indexes content that has been altered since
the last index. Earlier versions re-indexed all content, in batches,
Girouard says.
Improving Security
Google worked to improve security in the appliance. The earlier
version offered support for Microsoft's NTLM authentication technology
The appliance adds single sign-on support. Before the appliance
serves search results to a user, it validates the user's authority
to view content sources, Girouard says.
The field of vendors offering enterprise search technology is large.
Google's competition includes specialized search vendors such as
Autonomy Convera, Endeca, iPhrase and Verity Business software makers
such as Oracle and SAP also offer search applications.
Google's brand recognition makes its appliance a popular entry
on enterprise shortlists, according to Whit Andrews, a research
director at Gartner.
"Its low price, term license and simple deployment models are
best used in tactical external or intranet installations where content
need not be indexed directly from dynamic repositories," Andrews
wrote in an evaluation of the enterprise search market Gartner published
last month.
Relevancy Analysis
Where the Google appliance falls short of some of its more sophisticated
competition is in its relevancy analysis of queries and document
structure semantics, according to Andrews.
The upgraded Google Search Appliance is a 2U Intel architecture
server running Linux. (The earlier version was 1U.) Pricing starts
at $32,000.
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