Google now counts 20,000 enterprise search customers, about a little more than half of whom use its search appliance and the rest of whom use its hosted site search and other enterprise products. To extend it search into the enterprise, Google is launching the fifth generation of its search appliance. Each yellow box, which is based on a standard Dell server, will be able to index 10 million documents, compared to 3 million in the last generation. And it will serve up results two to five times as fast as before, due to both hardware and software improvements.
The Google Search appliance can index pretty much any enterprise data generated by Oracle databases, SAP systems, Documentum, SharePoint, Salesforce.com, HR systems, intranets, wikis, and more, and presents it to employees in a familiar Google-like interface. Two of the new features of the appliance will be:
—Personalization: Different employees can see different results based on their role, business or position. For instance, engineers can get design drawings more highly weighted in internal search results than marketing materials. This can be set by both the IT administrator or the employee.
—Alerts: Just like Google Alerts, but tied to enterprise data. Triggered by keywords whenever new matches are made and pushed to your e-mail. If you subscribe to “downsizing,” will your boss find out?
I wish my company used this…but we never will.
I’m a Yahoo. Our intranet search blows.
Google’s product is actually pretty disappointing. We use it and are uh… not exactly happy with it.
20,000 is a very low count for a company like Google, after so many years. Google did really poor marketing job in this area.
Yeah, 20,000 thousand is too low. According to Rishi Chandra – Product Manager of Google Enterprise, “a half a million organizations are using our products on a day-to-day basis. We have tens of millions of users on products; we sign up over three thousand new businesses a day.”
i wish our company SAP used this as well…the intranet portal search could be lots better
Better use DBSight, which can setup a search on any database in 3 minutes
I’ve been consulting for large public and private sector organizations to build employee workplace portals and intranets. The only organizations that had their internal search working properly were using Google appliances. All other solutions were not able to search across data silos or bring up any relevant results at all.
Does it fix the egregious security hole it used to have where restricted-access items were listed in search results?
Does sound useful, for the companies that can afford it.
http://blabtech.blogspot.com
one of our clients uses this and while in many ways it’s great, i can tell you it’s also quirky and sometimes a real PITA
And customer support just doesn’t answer. They wish they hadn’t implemented it.
If you are trying to buy the Google Search Appliance, Google Mini and Maps licenses in Australia and Asia Pacific, Google only sells via a specialised channel in Australia and most of Asia Pacific. They are available at http://www.searchcorp.com.au
Re: Security, correctly configured it will serve appropriate SERPS for the users access levels.
We will have pricing for the new model in the next week or so.
We used Google then dumped it due to poor performance and cost. We use X1 – http://www.x1.com. Much better solution, faster, flexible, and the GUI is head and shoulders better than anything else on the market.
Andy Wong – I agree that 20,000 customers is very low. Even if Google Appliance can index millions of documents from SharePoint many times faster; I seldom see consultants offer it to client and rarely do clients buy it either.
Out of the 30 or so clients right off my head who are using SharePoint, there is only one who actually implemented Google appliance and is on a very small scale — small region…
we just had Google consultants over at our company. it was an evaluation talk to check if the Search Appliance could handle our SAP Netweaver personalized content. It cannot! and at least Google Europe has no clue about SAP Portals and role based content. Sure Google can index all content and maybe does a great job finding the right content for me, but it will not filter content, that I am not allowed to see. It does not look like a solution for an environment where more or less all of the users have different access rights to content.