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 website.
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. For example,
a university might buy a Google Search Appliance to provide search
capabilities for its student and employee intranets, as well as its
public websites.
The appliance can now index more documents, do so more
intelligently and perform more queries per minute, said Dave
Girouard, Google's enterprise unit general manager. The latest
version also features improved security and allows for collections
of indexed documents to be partitioned with more flexibility.
"We launched this product quietly in 2002 and it has grown
nicely and become a successful business for Google," he added.
"This is our first major new upgrade of the product."
In terms of performance enhancements, the latest 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.
It 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 aimed to speed up the process and reduce
consumption of bandwidth and processing power.
The latest 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 are made.
Google also enhanced the product's security by improving its
ability to prevent users from viewing documents they're not
authorised to access. 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.
The latest version of the Search Appliance is twice as tall as
the first version because it has more powerful hardware, which in
turn generates more heat and requires more space for cooling. That
means it is 2U (3.5 inches) high, and 19 inches wide.
Google did not reveal which company makes the appliance's
hardware. "It's commodity hardware - the same general hardware we
use in our Google data centres," said Girouard.
A basic installation of the Search Appliance can be completed in
as little as 30 minutes, allowing an IS department to have it
running in a matter of hours, he said. Installations that involve
deeper customisation will take longer to complete.
The product is sold as a standalone device under its GB 1001
model number. A GB 1001 with a capacity of 150,000 documents starts
at $32,000, while one with the maximum capacity of 1.5 million
documents costs $175,000. The new version of the GB 1001 is
available now. Included in the price are two years of customer
support.
The Search Appliance is also sold in preconfigured stacks of
multiple GB 1001s. The GB 5005 is a stack of five devices, while
the GB 8008 is a stack of 12 devices. Google pre-configures these
stacked devices to work together.
Google did not have statistics for the performance improvements
that the stacked products of the new version will offer. Prices for
the stacked products are determined by the number of documents they
can index.
Juan Carlos Perez writes for IDG News
Service