Google revamps Search Appliance

 

Gallery

By Reuters

Posted on 3 Jun 2009 at 08:46

Google has continued its push into the business world by revamping its Search Appliance.

The sleek yellow boxes, based on hardware from Dell and Intel, come loaded with Google software and allow companies to harness Google's search capabilities to root through their internal documents.

Instead of the three models it previously offered, Google will now sell two boxes: the GB 7007, which can index between 500,000 and 10 million documents, and the GB 9009, which can index 30 million documents.

More importantly, customers can now string together multiple appliances so, for instance, an index of one billion company documents can be quickly searched by a company's employees.

New security and customisation features mean that different departments within a company can link their appliances, giving certain users - say those with a higher security clearance at a federal agency - access to a broader set of search results than would have been presented to others.

The goal is to make search the "unifying glue" across an organisation's various departments, says Nitin Mangtani, Google's senior product manager for enterprise search.

Mangtani revealed the entry-level 7007 model costs $30,000, including two years of support. Google does not disclose pricing on the 9009 model but notes that the price is less than the 7007 on a price-per-document basis.

Sanford Bernstein analyst Jeff Lindsay estimates that Google's enterprise business will generate $240 million in sales this year, with the majority from enterprise applications like corporate Gmail, rather than the search appliance.

Dashboard

Google has also introduced a new "dashboard" for its core search site that provides local businesses with information about searches relating to their companies.

Based on Google's analysis of the data it collects across its services, including Google Search and Google Maps, a pizzeria for instance could find out how many people are clicking on its store hours, or which postcode is the most common among diners seeking driving directions.

The product is free, and is intended to showcase the usefulness of online data analysis to local businesses, many of whom may not even have their own website.

Dashboard is currently only available in the US.