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The Appliance of science – Google-style
Searching intranets and public website? No problem!
WE ARE ALL familiar with Google.
Now Google Inc. has developed Google Search Appliance for the UK and across
Europe. Google Search Appliance was first introduced in the USA in 2002
but made its UK and European debut in mid-October.
With its familiar look-and-feel, Google Appliance should not be too difficult
to come to grips with. Its an out-of-the-box, plug-and-play system designed
to be simple and easy to use. Well, as simple and easy to use as these
things can be.
 The
Google Search Appliance is an integrated hardware and software search
solution that enables corporations, universities and government agencies
to deliver Google-quality search results on their intranets and public
websites in up to twenty-eight languages thus capturing a sizeable proportion
of the European market. This new product enables both customers and staff
to find the products and information they need easily and efficiently
through a tailor-made facility. This customisation includes such facilities
as removing the search facility from web pages that are private or confidential
or making the search results on screen look like Google or the website
of the users organisation.
Google Search Appliance is intended to reduce the burden of organising
information by administering the search facility throughout an organisations
website. There is no need to configure hardware and operating systems
and the whole system can be maintained by a single administrator.
Users do not need to know how it works (through sophisticated algorithms),
only that they will be able to find what they want, when they want it,
in the familiar, document-ranked way, just as they do on Google.
Apart from answering enquiries and searches, Google Search Appliance also
helps in understanding an organisations information by tracking and analysing
content across all its servers. This, in turn, reveals which hosts have
the most content, which pages are missing and why, which pages have broken
links, search terms used and so on.
 End-User
Experience
The Google Search Appliance offers end users many of the same benefits
they have come to expect from google.co.uk with specific enterprise enhancements
that make search easy, useful and intuitive:
Familiar Google search experience:
The Google Search Appliance provides users with a search experience with
which they are already comfortable. This includes sub-second response
times, dynamically generated snippets and cached HTML pages. Users need
no special training and therefore will make more frequent use of search.
Google Quality and Ranking: Google factors in more than
100 variables for each query to find the highest quality and most relevant
documents. The Google Search Appliance employs many of the same search
algorithms of Google.com. These algorithms are tuned and optimised for
the particular needs of the enterprise, resulting in better quality search
right out of the box.
Dynamic Page Summaries: The user can judge the relevance of results
easily with dynamically generated snippets showing the query in the context
of the page.
Automatic Spellcheck: To avoid missing results through
typos or misspellings, Google automatically suggests sensible corrections,
even on company-specific words and phrases.
Results Grouping: Users can navigate search results easily and
clearly using intelligent grouping of documents residing in the same narrow
sub-directories.
Cached Pages: Search results can be viewed even when
the sites are down using cached copies of pages included in the search
results.
Highlighted Query Terms: The most relevant section of
a document can be found quickly using the highlighted query terms displayed
on cached documents.
View as HTML: Documents can be displayed without needing
the original client application of the file format thanks to automatic
reformatting of over 220 file types into HTML.
Sort by Date: Time-sensitive information can be accessed
via date sorting.
Advanced Boolean Search: It is possible to perform complex
and sophisticated queries with over 10 special query terms, including
Boolean AND, OR, and NOT searches.
 Administration
and Customisation
Web-Based Admin Console: Multiple logins and administrative
roles for crawling, serving and monitoring can be configurted with an
intuitive, easy-to-use interface. Google customers often have the search
appliance up and running in an hour or less. Depending on the number of
documents to be indexed, high quality search results can be available
in just a few hours. The Google Search Appliance needs very little in
the way of ongoing maintenance thus resulting in a low total cost of ownership.
Collections: The search index can be segmented to show
different results to different users, for example, by domain name, geography,
job function, etc.
Filters: Users can easily restrict searches to specific
languages, file types, websites, and/or meta tags.
Synonyms: Administrators and users can establish synonyms
for company-specific acronyms or terminology and have those terms displayed
as suggested alternative queries, e.g. a University may have a course
entitled Computer Science with a reference number CS1. Google Search Appliance
can be configured to know that CS1 is a synonym of Computer Science and
users directed there as an alternative.
Keymatch: Matches between URLs and keywords can be defined
so that targeted results appear above the main set of search results.
Look and Feel: Search result layout pages using XSLT
stylesheets can be used to provide different branding on different areas
of the customers site.
Reporting: It is easy to view and export statistics of
daily and hourly results, the most frequent queries, popular search terms,
special feature usage and more.
URL: Tracking If problems with servers or errors and
sources of content arise they can be quickly identified through analysing
all the crawled content.
RAID Support: This provides redundancy from disk drive
failures, increasing reliability and uptime.
Remote Diagnostics: Maintenance is simplified through
optional remote diagnostics by Google support.
Enterprise Content
Continuous Crawler: A newly developed, sophisticated crawler scans document
collections continuously, resulting in fresh, relevant search results.
This crawler is designed to minimise system demands by detecting and collecting
only documents added or modified since the last index update.
Web Servers: These provide access to content from all
of an organisations web servers regardless of location.
Enterprise security and secure content: The Google Search
Appliance can restrict search results so that only those users with access
to a particular document can see it. By employing a variety of standard
security protocols such as HTML forms-based authentication, Google ensures
that search results will be displayed only for which the user has been
authenticated. Forms-based authentication is integrated with forms-based
single sign-on security systems, including Oblix and Netegrity to enable
seamless searching across secure content
Proxy Servers include externally hosted company content
via crawling of proxy servers. Lotus Domino integrate with Lotus Notes
environments using fast, efficient crawling of Lotus Domino servers.
Meta Tags deliver search narrowing and filtering based
on meta tag values and display of meta tag values in search results.
File Types: Over 220 file types, including HTML, Microsoft
Office, PDF, PostScript, WordPerfect, Lotus and many others can be searched.
Languages: More than 50 left-to-right and right-to-left
languages can be searched and results restricted to any one of over 28
languages enabling users to segment search results by language.
Google Search Appliance is available in three models: the GB-1001, for
departments and mid-sized companies up to 1.5 million documents and 300
queries per minute; the GB-5005, for dedicated, high-priority search services
such as customer-facing websites and company-wide intranet applications
up to 3 million documents and 300 queries per minute; and the GB-8008,
for centralised deployments supporting global business units up to 15
million documents and 1,000 queries per minute. Prices are start at 19,000
for the hardware and software updates and two years support.
Current users
The following European and worldwide organisations are already using the
Google Search Appliance for their businesses and seeing results:
Morgan Stanley
Morgan Stanley has been using the Google Search Appliance for over a year
to provide intranet search for more than 25,000 employees around the world,
searching an index of 2.2 million documents from 200 different intranet
web services. Since its introduction, search traffic has increased by
a factor of 11 proof of how incredibly valuable employees have found improved
access to the corporate information that Google provides. Google's expansion
into the European market will help global organisations like Morgan Stanley
deliver improved search facilities to employees and customers around the
world. www.morganstanley.com
The British Library
Millions of people visit the British Library's website every year to explore
the wealth of material from the Library's collection, including thousands
of images and sound recordings as well as the Library's digitised Treasures
in Full. After evaluating multiple solutions the Library chose the Google
Search Appliance which not only fulfilled all their requirements but was
easily the least expensive option. The pilot was recieved very favourably
and the Library foresees this new search engine will improve its users
experience even more. www.bl.uk
The United Nations
What the UN liked about the Google Search Appliance was the fact that
installation was fully automated, it is ready to use out of the box and
once plugged into the network it was up and crawling in less than an hour.
www.un.org
Other European organisations that have selected the Google Search Appliance
include Vebra, ContactMusic.com, Euromoney Institutional Investor, the
National Health Service (NHS) and the Commonwealth Secretariat.
Google UK. www.google.co.uk;
www.google.co.uk/appliance
IM@T Online December 2004
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