Google Search Appliance Takes Five

October 12, 2007; 03:07 AM

Google Inc. announced on Wednesday the fifth generation of the iconic yellow Google Search Appliance™ hardware, version 5.0, which provides universal search capabilities for secure access to enterprise content systems—including EMC Documentum, IBM FileNet, OpenText Livelink, and Microsoft SharePoint. The company also announced significant improvements in reach, security and relevance, in addition to business search technology developments available at the new Google Enterprise Labs™ site.

"When we launched the first Google Search Appliance five years ago, we had a vision to make search inside of business as simple and effective as searching on Google.com," said Dave Girouard, vice president and general manager of Google Enterprise. "By combining Google's deep knowledge in search with more understanding and control for environments behind the firewall, we are helping businesses keep pace with the velocity of information."

The new Google Search Appliance helps organizations gain from Google's research and engineering in "universal search" (a term that describes how search technology can work across information silos to give the best answer every time a user enters a query). This notion is vital for businesses, where content often resides in separate repositories.

To help break silos and reach into more enterprise content, the Google Search Appliance 5.0 now includes an enterprise connector framework for access to enterprise content management (ECM) systems. This framework extends the already sizable reach into 220 file formats, file shares, intranets, databases, applications, and hosted services. The connectors, which are available under open source licenses, include:

• EMC Documentum
• IBM FileNet
• OpenText Livelink
• Microsoft SharePoint

Security has been enhanced to include:

• Support for Microsoft Windows Integrated Authentication (WIA)
• Secure crawling and serving of file system content
• Significant performance increases in the SAML-based Authentication and Authorization API

In addition, Google also announced Google Enterprise Labs, a site dedicated to improving the search experience inside businesses by providing early access to such search innovations as:

• Search-as-you-Type adds dynamic, real-time search by presenting suggestions and auto-complete queries while the user is typing. Search-as-you-Type is ideal for directory lookup, glossary terms, and search suggestions.
• Do-it-Yourself KeyMatch adds social search concepts to improve search results inside of business by allowing users to promote specific web pages for specific search terms, such as the CEO blog as the top result for CEO. Administrators have the option to monitor what's been added and deleted.
• Parametric Search and Filtering allows for drill-down on search results leveraging semi-structured information and metadata.

The Google Search Appliance was launched in 2002. The number of customers have grown on average 100 percent year-over-year, and today more than 10,000 companies now rely on Google enterprise search appliances (Google Search Appliance and Google Mini) to help employees find business information. The new Google Search Appliance supports English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Russian, Finnish, Danish, Norwegian, Chinese simplified, Chinese traditional, Japanese, Korean and Brazilian Portuguese. For more information, please visit http://www.google.com/enterprise/gsa/index.html.

About Google Inc.
Google's innovative search technologies connect millions of people around the world with information every day. Founded in 1998 by Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google today is a top web property in all major global markets. Google's targeted advertising program provides businesses of all sizes with measurable results, while enhancing the overall web experience for users. Google is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia. For more information, visit www.google.com.