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Challenge |
Overview
Founded in 1959, the Santa Clara, California-based National Semiconductor Corporation produces chips that power mobile and cordless phones, wired and wireless local area networks, TV set-top boxes, DVD players, and a host of other electronic devices that connect people to information.
In the complex and rapidly changing chip design and production business, efficient exchange of information between employees is critical to success.
The Challenge
Bill Corley, National Semiconductor's manager of intranet technology, was charged with finding a new intranet search solution for more than 10,000 company employees worldwide.
"With our old search engine, employees had to make several queries to find the right document," explains Corley. "We needed a solution that could scale with the growth of information inside National, while at the same time helping employees quickly find the information they need."
The National Semiconductor intranet is distributed over more than 200 servers globally and contains more than 500,000 documents, including HTML, Microsoft Office, and PDF documents.
The Solution
National Semiconductor chose the GB-8008 to simplify corporate search for administrators and employees.
"Google delivered the GB-8008 in the morning, and we had it crawling and indexing on our network that afternoon. It's amazing how simple it was to install," says Corley. "What's more, the Google Search Appliance is easy to administer and saves time by streamlining the process of finding and organizing all our intranet data. In fact, with Google, we doubled the number of documents our employees can search." Besides doubling the size of the index, the increased throughput of the Google crawler and indexer enabled Corley to improve the refresh rate for the index by a factor of four over the previous search engine. "Where the old engine indexed 2,500 documents an hour, the Google Search Appliance indexes roughly 25,000. This allows us to completely reindex the documents of relevance in about twelve hours, so we don't have to worry about incremental indexing. Adding subcollections is also very easy, with no need for a separate crawl and index for that content."
Corley also appreciates Google's open-standards approach, notably the ability to run transformations on search data. "When we look at where we're going with other applications and Web services in general, clearly that's a benefit." 1
End Result
"The number of searches performed each day has more than doubled," adds Corley. "Our employees are inspired to use our intranet search when they hear it's powered by Google. They love Google because it helps them to be more productive."
About the Google Search Appliance
The Google Search Appliance is an integrated corporate search solution that extends Google's award-winning search technology to intranets and websites. The Google Search Appliance is available in three models: the GB-1001 for departments and mid-sized companies, the GB-5005 for dedicated, high-priority search services such as customer-facing websites and company-wide intranet applications, and the GB-8008 for centralized deployments supporting global business units.
1 Quoted in InternetWeek, June 18, 2002.
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