On average, most businesses currently double the number of digital documents they have every twelve to eighteen months. The impact of this rapid addition of content, argues Google, is that the search functionality of an organization’s databases and Websites need to be scalable in a dynamic environment. Google maintains that scalability is a crucial need of enterprises today, which is why the new version of Google’s Search Appliance (GSA) for enterprise search customers has added a powerful, dynamic scalability feature, allowing businesses to now index billions of documents, in addition to indexing Web pages.
To extend search into the enterprise, Google offers businesses its GSA product, a yellow box (that resembles a slice of Swiss cheese), which is based on a standard Dell server and is powered by Xeon 5500 Series processors from Intel. The GSA can index 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. The sixth generation GSA will be able to index 30 million documents, compared to 10 million in the last generation. In the sixth generation of the GSA, Google is now adding functionality to let businesses stack GSAs on top of each other, so businesses can search billions of documents across integrated GSAs. The fifth generation GSAs were not able to be interconnected.
The new version of the GSA also allows businesses to separate data by sector of an organization (engineering, marketing, finance) but still be able to provide unified search results of all data contained within each appliance. Each department can also monitor and regulate which documents should be integrated into enterprise-wide search and which should be kept within the department’s search.
In the new version of the GSA, Google has upgraded the customization of the appliance, adding several new features to help businesses tailor the GSA to their search needs. First, Google now allows administrators to specify whether the GSA will implement late binding, which is real time authorization of whether a user has access to a document, or early binding, where the GSA holds a cache of existing policy information about who can access which documents. Second, if a business has multiple GSAs operating search, administrators can give more importance in search results to a particular appliance (engineering documents vs. marketing documents). Developers can also add an extra ranking framework to stack search results.
Google is also revving up search results in the GSA, adding social search features such as suggested search and user-added results, that aggregate knowledge across the organization for more precise search results. Additionally, users can now enable cross-language search, where the GSA will translate their search results in real-time into whichever language they choose.
Google now counts 25,000 enterprise search customers, up from last year’s 20,000 customers. Over half of customers use Google’s search appliance and the rest use its hosted site search and other enterprise products. Last year, Google added results based on personalization and Google Alerts functionality to the GSA. This year’s emphasis on scale and customization reinforces Google’s potentially strong enterprise strategy for both content inside the firewall and in the cloud.
Anytime you mention something with Cheese, I finally think you are writing about http://www.worstpizza.com for me!
The google approach to hardware. They still have a long way to go, but pretty cool though.
http://www.twibeo.com
The FriendFeed and Twitter combo.
Do licences for each box also stack up? GSA boxes are *expensive*!
Try buying a license for 10M docs and the price will go into millions. For that much money you can take Solr or Lucene (http://lucene.apache.org) and make it do whatever you want!
I’m not sure what you are talking about. I just reviewed several search engines and Google was the cheapest.
“The new GSA is available now starting at $30,000 per server with capacities that serve from 500,000 to 30 million documents. Existing customers get the new software features free. ” -eWeek
Not to mention you don’t have to buy hardware or Microsoft licensing for Windows Server.
Google is often innovative in its products. GSA is being upgraded to produce an efficient way of indexing and searching documents inside a company. I suspect Google has a bigger project hidden there to produce a whole new generation of an operating system. Sounds likely, right?
That has to be the coolest looking server ever. It should be for the money though. $30k?!
Definitely looks like another device to drive PC market share from MS
Micro version of that Google appliance that is licensed to index 300k (that’s 100 times less than in new GSA server) documents is priced at $10k: http://www.goog...uct.asp?catid=3
Not only the document search is more important but also the version no. In an oragnisation if GSA is used, it should be able to point to latest version first
There is an industrial version of this done by a company in Quebec called Assyst-systems. The product is called Intra and it differs from googles by focusing on industrial documents(powerplants, papermills…etc), plus has work flow solutions..
With googles new research on scanning books the GSA makes even more sense. Google indeed is a SEARCH powerhouse.
Your comment begs the question…did anyone think google wasn’t a search powerhouse?
It’s no Bing
Leena, do you even know what “exponentially” means?
“Linearly” is the word you want.
Joe, the headline is a nod to how Google is billing its new architecture “GSA to the N” … hence exponentially.
Regardless, as the analyst community will likely point out, scalability has never been the primary weakness of Google’s enterprise search play. Tuning, mining, refinement and security have been the major roadblocks and why most of GSA’s deployments remain relatively tactical.
Joe, she means it grows exponentially as you buy exponentially more boxes
But [GSA] + 1 isn’t nearly as sexy to geeks.
Actually, the trick is that exponent does not always mean exponentiation. Say, it can be used to denote a string with n repeating characters.
You are a moron of the kind that means to spread their idiocy.
Doubling every 12-18 months. 2, 4, 8, 16, 32… it’s an exponentially growing problem.
Heh – yes – for which you get to pay exponentially more money to Google …
Well phrased!
PS: Technically you might do it a little better, if you get discounts as a loyal customer!
no, exponention would be something like squaring it every time – you know, raising it to an exponent?
2, 4, 16, 256, 65536, …
get it?
Seems to me, that you are messing up exponentiation (as a math operation) with a term “exponential growth”, which is for example doubling the number of requests every year. However, what the scalable architecture suggests is really a linear solution. That is to deal with a doubling requests you are doubling number of servers.
BK, the point is not that the problem isn’t exponential, it’s that you’ll need 2,4,8,16,32… boxes to deal with it, i.e. an exponential number of them.
The only sense in which the “Google Search Appliance Can Grow Exponentially” is if you buy an exponential number of them! Not a problem for Google if you’re buying them at $30k a pop!
Man,
be polite. Where do you see doubling here? If you need to handle the double load, you double the number of servers. It is not if you added, say 10% more servers, to handle the double load.
Joe, exactly. The solution is indeed linear, nobody invented yet, how to deal with exponentially increasing document numbers with linearly increasing sets of servers (of the same CPU speed and storage capacity).
Google is wrong. Their whole attitude towards enterprise software lack one crucial factor – integration.
The GSA can scale to a billion documents, but if this search does not integrate into existing enterprise systems – either ERP (SAP,Oracle) or outlook, which is also heavily used. For the business user, finding the relevant document is not enough – the document has to link to a business transaction (sales order, requisite request, production order etc.)
Haven’t you figured it out yet? All Google products are a work in progress which is what “beta” meant in a lot of their products. This is still better than anything else out there. You want perfection it will take time.
Better than anything else out there? Which competing products are you comparing GSA to Gebadia?
The only one I know is Intra but that is for large industry…what else is there? I would like to know..
There should be a lot large scale enterprise solutions…. Just google them!
Anyway did you guys know that every two/three years you need to pay the new box price for the box to continue function?
This is true, however, when you figure the price of other Enterprise Search devices it is still far cheapter. Also, if after 3 years you decide you don’t like GSA you rip it out and can install something else.