Google stepped up its enterprise search proposition today with the
introduction of a hardware appliance designed for high priority,
heavy traffic environments.
The GB-5005 is a cluster of five of Google's previously released
GB-1001 appliances, extending the search capabilities to three
million documents and 150 queries per minute.
The GB-1001 and the higher-powered GB-8008 search appliances were
rolled out in February.
"If you need something [for] high traffic and high uptime
requirements, [the GB-5005] is designed for that. Everything is
pre-clustered and load-balanced, and we make it easy in an
appliance," said John Piscitello, product manager at Google.
The clustering approach is transparent to end-users and
administrators, Piscitello said, appearing as a single machine but
offering the benefits of automatic failover in case of disc failure
and an improved capacity for uptime.
"Clustering of inexpensive hardware is something we've done on
Google.com and we are now offering it in the appliance," he said.
"You don't have to deal with the complexities of clustering but get
the benefits."
In addition, the GB-5005 adds support for secure content including
basic authentication and Microsoft Windows NT LAN Manager (NTLM)
authentication protocol.
The new capabilities allow the appliance to crawl public and secure
documents, authenticate users and display search results via access
rights.
Other enhancements include increased content freshness achieved
through a smaller index layer that is updated once a day or once
every hour, combined with a larger layer updated less frequently,
Piscitello said.
Google now has an offering meant to handle the scalability and
reliability issues of really large Web sites, particularly
externally facing sites, according to Laura Ramos, director of
research at Giga Information Group.
Google maintains that a hardware/software combination results in
higher reliability and faster deployment, and can replace the need
for professional services. The company's "just plug in and go"
mantra has appealed to customers in this tough economic client,
according to Ramos.
"By and large, the results [trial corporate users] are getting are
very similar to the type of results you'd expect from Google.com.
Customers are very happy with the relevance rankings, the look and
feel, and the ability to get it running quickly and easily," Ramos
said.
The capability to search secure content is an important requirement
for enterprises. Google's approach is simple yet effective,
according to Ramos.
"Google is not indexing the documents and keeping security controls
inside the index and then worrying about synchronisation," she
said. "Basically, when you do an inquiry they figure out whether
the content is public or private, then they check whether or not
you have the credentials to see the content."
Other vendors are also stepping up efforts in the search
market.
InQuira today rolled out the latest versions of its
industry-specific dictionaries for self-service corporate search.
The dictionaries allow companies in the automotive, financial
services, utilities, manufacturing, and high-tech industries to
deploy self-service and search software applications for lowering
customer support costs on the Web and in call centres.
Another search player, iPhrase, is poised to roll out an updated
version of its One Step natural language search engine.
Version 4.0 of One Step will include a modular enhancement dubbed
Interaction Advantage, which allows a search to go beyond a
corporate Web site and access information from pre-determined sites
that could offer related and useful information, according to
iPhrase.
Meanwhile, guided navigation technology provider Endeca is ready to
launch its Enterprise Search tool designed to combat the problem of
information overload and too many search results returned per
query.