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Google upgrades Search Appliance
Wednesday, June 09, 2004
Google has upgraded its Search Appliance, improving the capacity and
performance of the device which combines hardware and software to
provide in a box the search functionality employed by the Google.com
web site.
MIAMI – Google has upgraded its Search Appliance, improving the
capacity and performance of the device which combines hardware and
software to provide in a box the search functionality employed by
the Google.com web site.
The appliance has been revamped to index more documents, do so
more intelligently and perform more queries per minute, said Dave
Girouard, Google's enterprise unit general manager. The new version
of the product also features improved security and allows for collections
of indexed documents to be partitioned with more flexibility and
granularity, he said.
Introduced in early 2002, the appliance is aimed at companies,
educational institutions and government agencies that want to make
their sites searchable using Google technology. "This is our
first major new upgrade of the product," said Girouard.
Mismatched expectations
The feedback Jupiter Research has gotten from customers about the
first version of the product has been mixed, said David Schatsky,
a Jupiter Research analyst. "What dissatisfaction there is
probably comes from mismatched expectations between what clients
need from search and what the Google appliance was able to deliver
in its first version," he said.
Schatsky said the company seems to have added features the market
requires. "It sounds like in this upgrade Google is moving
forward and has focused on key areas for improvement that early
adopters have cited as needing development." Schatsky said.
Providing good search functionality for their web sites is complicated
for many organisations, he said. "The difficulties are related
to various elements, such as technology, operational processes and
user understanding. As a result, many companies feel they don't
have the internal competencies to make search an effective tool
and are thus attracted by the brand name and reputation of Google
in a box."
In terms of performance enhancements, the new version can index
as many as 1.5 million documents, which is five times as many as
the first version, and execute 300 queries per minute, also a five-fold
improvement, he said.
The new version also features more intelligent and efficient document
crawling. The first version crawled documents in batch fashion,
meaning it would scan and index the entire collection of documents
every time the administrator scheduled a refresh. The new version
only scans and indexes documents that have changed since the last
crawl, an improvement that speeds up the process and reduces consumption
of bandwidth and processing power, Google said.
In addition, administrators don't have to schedule the updates,
since the new version is continuously crawling the collection, which
results in changes being indexed more promptly. Thus, with the first
version, the Search Appliance would be configured to run a batch
update once a day, or once every two days, which could delay changes
until the update was run, while the new version detects changes
soon after they're made, Girouard said.
Google also enhanced the product's security by improving its
ability to prevent users from viewing documents they're not authorised
to access, he said. After executing a query, the upgraded product
rounds up all the documents that contain the keywords and then filters
those documents based on the user who made the query, showing only
the documents that the user has permission to view, he said.
Another new feature is the ability to create different collections
of documents, whereas the first version allowed only for the
creation of one collection of documents, he said. Thus, with the
new version, a company might create a collection of searchable documents
for its sales and marketing employees, a different one for its call
centre employees, and so on.
A related new feature is the product's ability to support different
user interfaces for a single collection. Thus, the administrator
might set up a user interface for the sales and marketing employees
that is different from the user interface for the call centre employees,
while having both sets of users access the same collection of documents,
he said.
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