Google Boosts Enterprise Search Appliance

By Richard Karpinski

Google on Monday announced a new mid-tier search appliance that companies can put behind their firewall and gain all the benefits of Google's public search technologies and algorithms.

Google debuted its search appliance earlier this year. The new GB-5005 fits between the two previous offerings, and is targeted at applications -- such as customer-facing Web sites and corporate intranets -- that need a high-availability search offering. The GB-5005 appliance features five clustered servers.

Google previously released the GB-1001 for departments and mid-sized firms, and the GB-8008 for the very largest, enterprise-wide deployments.

Google also added new features across entire appliance line, including the ability to search secure information protected by basic authentication. Users performing such searches can only gain access to the content if they have proper authorization.

The GG-5005 and GB-8008 also gained the ability to perform incremental updates that let an IT administrator create two layers of searchable information -- fast-changing top layer that can be changed hourly and a larger, base layer that can be updated every day. In addition, the GB-8008 features increased search capacity. It can now search up to 7 million documents in a single query, a 75 percent increase.

Google has also tweaked its pricing a bit. Companies can now acquire the hardware and software platform on a trial basis for four weeks before making a purchase decision.