Google's search plan could bring enterprise search to
the masses
Google’s mission is “to organise the world’s information and
make it universally accessible and useful”. So far it has barely
scratched the surface, because most of the world’s information is
stored on corporate servers, behind firewalls. This makes Google’s
enterprise search strategy important, even if it does not make
economic sense at the moment.
Google entered the enterprise search market in 2002 with the
rack-mounted Google Search Appliance (GSA), a dedicated combination
of hardware and software designed simply to “plug in and go”. It
has now added the Google Mini, which searches up to 50,000
documents for £1,295, or up to 300,000 for £4,000.
This is well within the reach of small companies who would never
normally consider an enterprise search product, and it is easy to
buy direct from Google’s website.
So far, Google’s search appliance businesses only contribute to
about 1% of its turnover, and the whole enterprise search market is
too small to be worth the effort, even if Google owned all of it.
But it does make sense if Google can expand that market to hundreds
of thousands and ultimately, perhaps, millions of small
businesses.
That process has now started and in a break with tradition,
Google is doing it through partners. The argument runs as follows:
if you want to organise the world’s NetSuite data, sign up NetSuite
as a partner and get it to develop a module that will work with
your search appliance.
Google already has NetSuite, Oracle, Cognos, SAS,
Salesforce.com, Bearing Point and others involved. These all have
modules to display search data via the Google Onebox for Enterprise
feature, which is similar to the way that weather and travel
information is added to Google web searches.
Of course, Google is not going to get involved with every
company that has developed a business application. However, it has
published an applications programming interface and a set of
guidelines for writing Onebox modules, and put a free software
development kit on its website.
Companies that have data locked in programs developed in-house
can develop a module for Google’s search system. Third parties can
develop modules for applications even if the publisher does not:
there are already modules for Microsoft Exchange, for example.
And although Google searches are generally associated with
crawling a relatively static web, the new GSA approach does not
have such limitations. Indeed, if you can convert your data into an
XML feed then you can write a custom connector (eg. a Python
script) to feed it into the Google Search Appliance. Even real time
data can be handled this way.
Jack Schofield is computer editor at The Guardian