Google beefs up enterprise search appliances

Google has updated its enterprise specific search appliance, adding key features such as translation and deep integration into Microsoft's SharePoint 2010 offering.

Google Search Appliance (GSA) 7.0 allow users to translate search results in up to 60 languages. Full support has also be added for complex languages such as Arabic, and updates have been made to Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

Matthew Eichner, general manager of global enterprise search, explained the translation feature is one of the most important to business.

"We're seeing a lot of demand for the translation feature especially as cross-border transactions/acquisitions are common place.

"When there is a deal or acquisition between foreign firm's, a repository of information needs to be translated," he told IT Pro.

Although GSA supports number of third party repositories ranging from Documentum to SAP, Google has found SharePoint to be one of the most commonly used.

"We've made it possible to insert a GSA search box into SharePoint 2010. There is support for query suggestion (autocomplete), results clustering," added Brent VerWeyst, product manager, enterprise search at Google.

"We've also added expert search. This pulls information from the user profile databases including SharePoint and will recommend colleagues to contact for additional information after a user has carried out a specific search."

Another useful feature is the addition of moderated social suggestions or "wisdom of the crowd" tool. When an employee finds a particularly useful result for a query, they can create a match and publish it to help colleagues.

With the increased use of smartphones and tablets, Google's universal search feature also means that laptops, tablets and smartphones to the GSA.

At present Google offers two appliances the GSA 7007, which is capable of supporting up to 10 million documents and the 9009, which can handle 30 million documents. Both can be scaled to any arbitrary document count.

Pricing depends on the number of documents stored and typically starts at $15,000 per year for 500,000 documents.