Google has upgraded its Google Search Appliance (GSA) to help enterprise customers strengthen and simplify search on their intranets and Web sites. The company's integrated hardware/software box now processes more queries and handles larger collections of documents than when it was first version introduced in 2002.
In addition, the new GSA features a continuous crawl to make sure that the search inventory contains the most up-to-date content. Or, administrators can add pages manually.
Google has upgraded its Google Search Appliance (GSA) to help enterprise customers strengthen and simplify search on their intranets and Web sites.
The Mountain View, Calif., company's integrated hardware/software box now processes more queries and handles larger collections of documents than when it was first version introduced in 2002.
In addition, the new GSA features a continuous crawl to make sure that the search inventory contains the most up-to-date content. Or, administrators can add pages manually.
Pricing starts at $32,000 for a 2-year license that includes support. Three GSA models are offered: GB-1001, which indexes up to 1.5 million documents; GB-5005, which provides automatic fail-over for high uptime; and GB-8008, which centralizes deployments for far-flung business units.
"We deliver relevant Google search results for users while lowering the cost and lessening the amount of time required to manage search on intranets and consumer-facing Web sites," Dave Girouard, general manager of Google's enterprise business, said in a statement.
Since its debut, Google has signed up approximately 500 GSA customers, including the University of Florida, USATODAY and Xerox. The overriding aim is to have searches of corporate intranets be as easy and effective as searching the Web.
The new GSA is configurable both in terms of interface and filtered results. The company claims that once it's deployed, internal site search stats soar. Google says one client, National Semiconductor, saw 8 to 10 times the number of internal searches after deploying the box.
In the enterprise search space, Google competes with Autonomy, Verity, FAST Search & Transfer and others. While it's landed some big-name accounts for GSA, most of Google's business comes from advertising sold on its search results page.
Boosting enterprise business could help it diversify as it prepares to go public and mitigate somewhat the threat from Yahoo! and Microsoft (Quote) which are looking to unseat Google.
The GSA upgrade comes on the heels of other Google initiatives, including a test versions of free Web e-mail, dubbed Gmail, and a personalized Web search feature that delivers custom results based on a user's preferences.
