Google Soups Up Enterprise Search Appliance

With an eye to the largest federal agencies, Google introduced its most powerful search appliance June 2, touting the Google Search Appliance 6.0's ability to stack and connect multiple search appliances for limitless linking.

According to Google, GSA 6.0's dynamic scalability allows the largest government agencies and enterprises to search billions of documents with options to customize administrative, security and relevancy features.

Additionally, cross-language enterprise search also enables enterprise users across the globe to translate their search results in real time—into whichever language they choose.

"With the GSA 6.0, it's easy for companies to give all employees the powerful Google search experience inside their business—even if they are searching among billions of documents in dispersed intranets, data stores, languages or geographies," Dave Girouard, president of Google Enterprise, said in a statement. "With the improved architecture and software for the search appliance, global businesses can provide secure search across the largest enterprise content repositories—with one GSA system that can scale to billions of documents without limits."

Google's plan is to make GSA the most powerful, all-encompassing enterprise search server in the world and the first choice over Microsoft and products from Vivisimo, Endeca and Autonomy. The GSA follows Google's Universal Search template for the search giant's consumer search service. This allows GSA users to search text, video and blogs in Web servers, portals, file shares and databases.

Google said because of improved precision in the core algorithms, GSA 6.0 includes social search features, such as Query Suggestions and User-added Results, that aggregate knowledge across the organization for more precise search results.

The debut of GSA 6.0 was held at Google's offices in Washington, where Google officials see government agencies as prime customers for the souped-up enterprise search tool.

"The Google Search Appliance deployment is ramping up across the NASA systems," said David Valliere, CEO at eTouch, the search integrator for NASA. "The Google Search Appliance 6.0's new dynamic scalability feature is instrumental to helping search internally, and the customization options mean that search results match employee security authorization levels."

Valliere said NASA has multiple centers and complex intranets, but GSA 6.0 can search each autonomously, while still giving unified results.