Google Search Appliance

1. How is the Google Search Appliance different from other enterprise search solutions?

Google's unique hypertext analysis ranking methods identify the best quality pages on your intranet and public websites, making it easy for users to find the information they need. Google also delivers unique user-focused features like automated spell-checking, cached pages, dynamic snippets, indented results, and automatic conversion of Microsoft Office™ and PDF files to HTML.

Google's search algorithms use more than 100 factors to determine the ranking and relevancy of search results, many of them independent of link structure. With billions of searches to use as a basis for research and one of the industry's largest engineering groups dedicated to solving search problems, Google has consistently set the standard for search quality and innovation.

The best way to see how well Google's ranking system works in your environment is to complete our request information form to request an online demo and more information from our sales representatives. We're confident your users will prefer Google's results.

Google Search Appliance pricing is simple. There is a single price for the solution that includes two years of software updates and support for the hardware and the software, with no hidden maintenance or professional service fees. Pricing scales based on the number of documents crawled on your website or intranet. To receive a customized price based on your situation, please contact our sales team.

The Google Search Appliance delivers a simpler, more reliable solution with a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) than traditional enterprise software can offer. Because all customers run on a hardware configuration we have optimized, Google's software is more thoroughly tested. Because there's no need to run Google software on multiple operating systems, we're able to develop new features more quickly. And you get a lower TCO because there's no need to manage the complexities of the underlying operating system yourself.

Yes. Google provides a crawl system protected by basic authorization and NTLM authentication and Google enforces access rights for those performing searches. Users see only the results for documents they are authorized to see.

Yes. The Google Search Appliance will work with your forms-based single sign-on systems including Netegrity and Oblix to enable delivery of secure content to users after initial authentication.

Yes. You can index file systems by setting up an HTTP interface. NT file systems can do this with IIS, and NFS file systems can do this using Apache.

Yes. Google automatically recognizes Lotus Domino systems.

The Google Search Appliance can access any system with an HTTP/HTTPS interface, which includes content management systems. We have customers using it with Lotus, Vignette, and others.

Yes. Using Google's simple XSLT stylesheet, you can easily generate results that plug into a corporate portal framework such as Plumtree.

The Google Search Appliance easily crawls and searches dynamic Web pages, and automatically recognizes and handles dynamic session IDs common to many personalization and J2EE architectures.

Yes, Google searches more than 220 file types, converts them to HTML, and even provides hit highlighting in the search results. This makes it faster for users to look at files without having to launch additional desktop applications.

You can search database content if you have an application that serves database content as web pages, or if you export tables to XML files on a web server. Either approach enables Google's crawler to index those files via HTTP. Search results can be formatted using Google's XSLT stylesheet. The Google Search Appliance will offer even more direct database indexing support in the future.

While Google is focused on search, the Google Search Appliance works well with categorized information (users search by category). Categories are created by either (a) using meta tags in the HTML source (a technique common to many content management systems) or (b) defining collections using the Google Search Appliance Admin Console.

Google supports the Google Search Appliance hardware for the entire two-year license term, which includes maintenance and replacement if necessary. The internally clustered GB-5005 and GB-8008 models can withstand multiple hardware failures and will continue serving without any downtime.  The GB-1001 relies on RAID support to provide redundancy against drive failures.  When using the single-server GB-1001, many Google customers choose to deploy two units and mirror them for added reliability.

At this time, the Google Search Appliance can only be deployed in the United States, Europe and Canada. If you are located outside these areas, but your organization could deploy the Google Search Appliance at a location or data center in North America or Europe, you would be able to crawl content anywhere in the world and serve results to global users. If this is a potential solution, please contact us via our request information form, and be sure to list the US, European or Canadian location where you would like to deploy the Google Search Appliance.

Just fill out our request information form, and a Google sales representative will contact you.