Google’s Enterprise Search offerings have steadily grown in both strength and innovation over the past few years. As we reported in June, 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. Most recently, Google improved the scalability of its enterprise search appliance (also known as the GSA), allowing businesses to search billions of documents. Today, Google added two new tools for Google Enterprise Search: Side-by-Side search comparison and new connectors for the GSA, both available in Google’s Enterprise Labs, which is similar to Gmail Labs.
Side-by-Side search lets employees test and rate results from two different search queries (Policy A vs. Policy B) on the same data, to see which gives better results. Employees can vote on their preferred results, by clicking on either the Policy A or Policy B button and the administrator can then use that information to choose and set up the right search solution for the business. It seems that this feature would be useful to administrators who are constantly trying to make internal search capabilities more effective.
Google is also offering a new tool that lets businesses connect to different types of data, both online and offline, for search functionality. The GSA connector has been updated to search across content management systems of enterprises (such as SharePoint, FileNet, etc). Google also now provides a connector specifically for Salesforce data, so the GSA can include internal Salesforce data in search results.
correct me if I am wrong but is this basically Googles version of Yahoo Boss?
But this one is not Free….right?
right!
It’s Corporate news..(only for Corporates)
What is the difference between this and Google Custom Search? (other than the side by side features)
The status of Google products says that it will ultimately get over soon. But wonder if they will and when is Google planning to launch/release these?The status of Google products says that it will ultimately get over soon. But wonder if they will and when is Google planning to launch/release these?
Great!! Then its going to a more refined search, helping in effective decision making for business models.
Google is doomed to remain a niche player in the real enterprise search space (as opposed to enterprises who happen to own a GSA) until they have a solution that allows you to handle security mapping at *index* time instead of *query* time. Try to check the security on search results at the time you’re serving them up to the user is just silly in an environment that is at all distributed and/or heterogeneous. Of course if you’re willing to wait 10 seconds for a search to return, it’s probably doable, but then I doubt that’s what most people are expecting when they see a search branded with “Google”. With query-time security, your search is only as fast as the slowest responding content source that has a hit.
i think google did this for the users that are more of the little things a search engine displays to its users
Not sure how many folks will actually use a compare feature to see which results makes sense and then rate the results. The purpose of the search engine is to bring back the most relevant results for the query and not to mention the time involved. On the enterprise search front with companies like lucidimagination and searchblox pushing open source lucene, a number of enterprise customers are bound to make the switch.
@Samuel Yates
The GSA now supports early binding as of release 6.0
@Leena Rao
These projects and software have both been released for months and in fact the side by side has been over a year. What Google has done is to promote them to their ‘enterprise labs’ page.