Posted by Max Ziff, Engineering Lead, Google Enterprise Team

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems are useful to manage and version control the information assets of the organization. But lets be honest, they don't necessarily have the most best search mechanism to retrieve the valuable information contained within. The default search capabilities provided by ECM systems create new silos where users must log-in to multiple applications to retrieve the information. Our mission at Google is to provide a unified search experience across all enterprise content sources. Due to technical differences in the interfaces and the different security mechanisms supported by ECM systems there is need to build specific connectors to these systems.

We just open-sourced an interesting project that will make it easy to build connectors to ECM systems. This new connector framework provides rich service provider interfaces (SPI) to write connectors to different content sources. It also provides a security infrastructure to securely index and serve documents stored in ECM systems. Finally it provides rich administrative capabilities to configure the connectors to different ECM systems in a centralized way. The connector framework is designed for building connectors to ECM systems as well as other content sources that may or may not have web-enabled content.

The open source project contains source for Connector Manager, Connector SPI interfaces, associated javadocs, sample code and test suites. This is an early technical preview of the connector manager project and is not (yet) an officially supported feature in the Google Search Appliance. We wanted to get the word out sooner and invite the broader developer and partner community to give us feedback. Check out the connector manager project and let us know your thoughts on it.

Posted by Dave Girouard, VP and General Manager, Google Enterprise

Our OneBox technology has been part of our Search Appliance product since last April and it's really taking off with our customers. We're constantly hearing about cool and interesting uses of the technology for integrating realtime data into enterprise search results, just like weather forecasts can be integrated into Google.com results. One sly Google engineer connected our internal search appliance to a database of Googler's license plates, thus greatly easing the process of finding that sad soul who left their headlights on, blocked somebody else in, or was sideswiped by a runaway Prius. Just type in "plate" followed by any series of numbers or letters and you can immediately drop a message to the car's owner.

Posted by Kevin Gough, Enterprise Product Manager

Lakehead University became our first large-scale deployment of Google Apps for Education in Canada and shared with us some truly impressive statistics. Lakehead transitioned 38,000 students, faculty and alumni to Google Apps for Education in just one week. We think that getting all three of these groups on the same collaboration system should have a huge impact on learning (and student social calendars) as well as keep alumni involved in the campus community. Users should be excited about going from 60 MB of storage on their prior email system to 2 GB with Google Apps - eliminating the need to delete those large project files that happen to become useful come finals time.

What's most impressive is that Shahzad Jafri, Lakehead's Chief Information Officer, estimates that Lakehead will save $2-3 million in maintenance costs annually as well as $6 million in infrastructure costs - which is a big win for us and them! Read their press release for more information.

Posted by Nitin Mangtani, Google Search Appliance Product Manager

We came across another interesting article published in New Idea Engineering in the series - "Enterprise Search: Mapping Security Requirements to Enterprise Search". In this article Mark talks about the importance of document level security and the two methods of implementing it. We completely agree with Mark on the importance of supporting document level security with enterprise search systems. Anything short of fine-grained access control is no security at all. The Google Search Appliance supports document level security across heterogeneous enterprise content stores.

While we agree with Mark on some of the benefits with using early-binding security filtering, there are certain limitations that make it impractical (if not impossible) to use for most deployments today. One of the main issues with early-binding is synchronization with the access control list (ACL) policies stored in content systems. ACL policies change frequently, and caching the ACL policies results in policies being out-of-sync with the source system. This can cause severe breaches in company security and allow sensitive IP to be leaked within the organization.

The second issue is the lack of implemented standards for introspecting the ACL policies. Without a standard way of reading policies from source systems, companies are faced with difficult implementations or are only able to provide secure results inside a homogeneous system. The new MOSS 2007 search system is a prime example of this, where security is only enforced on content that is stored in the Sharepoint system and not across other content systems, web servers, or databases.

At Google, we're working to establish a scalable, standards-driven way of early-binding security filtering. For that to work we need implemented standards within content systems (web servers, file servers, document management systems, portals, etc.) for introspecting and notifying changes in ACL policies. Until then we continue to support late-binding, document-level security filtering and delivering the highest quality, highly secure search results to tens of millions of users in companies worldwide every day.

Posted by Nitin Mangtani, Google Search Appliance Product Manager

In the last tech tip we talked about how the inmeta operator can be used to do sophisticated queries leveraging the metadata associated with your documents. What if your needs are more complex? You not only want to do queries based on specific meta tag values but also need to provide price range searches on your e-commerce site or date range searches inside your document management system. Luckily we added few interesting operators in the recent release of the Google Search Appliance and they will play nicely with the inmeta operator.

We added new operators for doing number (including price) and date range searches. For number range searches, just add two numbers, separated by two periods, with no spaces, into the search box along with your search terms. For date range searches, use the daterange operator. Let's take a look at some common examples and see these operators in action.

An e-commerce site sells electronics and apparel goods and wants to make it easier for it's customers to search products by keywords and also restrict the searches by price range and other numeric meta tags. For example to express a query that searches for rain jacket in the price range of $100 to $500 one would enter a query like:

rain jacket inmeta:retailprice:$100..$500

You can also express a query that searches flat panel TV between 30 to 50 inches; one would enter a query like:

flat panel TV inmeta:size:30..50

In case of enterprise search, a search-user may be interested in the documents within an ECM system like Documentum or Livelink that provide information about "marketing plan" but restrict to only those documents that were published between Jan 1 2006 to Nov 27 2006. To express such a query one would simply enter a query like:

marketing plan inmeta:publishdate:daterange:2006-01-01..2006-11-27.

I have also seen e-commerce sites that use the Google Search Appliance to power their search, implement a simple search front-end that has a search box and a price slider along with it. Search-users enter the keyword in the search box and pick the appropriate price or number range using the UI widget. The search front-end in turn converts that request to the appropriate search syntax described in the above examples. This way the search-user not only has the power to express complex searches but she also doesn't need to familiarize herself with the additional syntax.

These range-based operators are more examples of how you can provide the power and precision of Google search with the flexibility and customization that your business requires.

Posted by James Wang, Google Mini Team

Here they are, the first 3 Google Enterprise Search Superstars. This award recognizes companies, and the individuals involved, with innovative enterprise search implementations.

Titans of industry? Men among men? Juggernauts of their respective fields? You be the judge. We hope you enjoy their stories and glean a few things you can do to make your users, whether employees or customers, happier and more effective in finding what they are looking for.

Looking to get ideas about how to create search functionality that can recommend experts within your company about a topic? Learn more about this in Danny Perri's "Expert Search" implementation.

Do you have an international audience and want to get some ideas on how to improve your search and service? Read and hear how Chris Hall improved his site.

Would you like to learn more about turning your support site into a more self service portal and increasing the efficiency of support staff? Read and hear more about this from Razi Mohiuddin's story of improving the customer service experience.

If you own a Google Mini or Google Search Appliance, then here's your chance at Search Superstardom. Come share your story with us so we can share it with the world.

Posted by Nitin Mangtani, Product Manager, Google Search Appliance

There was talk in the Google Search Appliance group this week about the new inmeta query operator; I thought it's time to introduce this new feature to a wider audience.

In a recent release of the Google Search Appliance we added the inmeta query operator allowing search-users to easily create more advanced queries based on meta tag values. The appliance has had this capability for a long time using the requiredfields and partialfields parameters as part of the search API protocol. The inmeta operator allows search users to issue partialfields and requiredfields type searches directly from the search box (in the q= parameter).

The syntax is pretty simple:

inmeta:{meta_tag}
inmeta:{meta_tag}~{meta_tag_value}
inmeta:{meta_tag}={meta_tag_value}

The first query syntax shows how to issue a requiredfields search, which will restrict the results to any containing the meta tag specified. The second will execute a partialfields search with a value, matching any results that have that meta tag with a value matching some or all of the value specified in the query. The third is how to issue a requiredfields search matching the exact value specified in {meta_tag_value}.

For example, if you had content source with all documents having meta tag author and each document having a different value for author meta tag such as john, rajesh, mike, etc. A search-user may be interested in the documents that provide information about "Q3 Revenue" but restrict to only those documents that were authored by John, as John the CFO of the organization. To express such a query she would simply enter a query like:

Q3 revenue inmeta:author=john

Now, if you didn't know that the data was well formatted, and some might have John's full name (John Smith), and some might have his email address (john@acme.com) then you would want to use the following syntax:

Q3 revenue inmeta:author~john

As you see from the above examples, it is very easy to express your queries and perform advanced, sophisticated searches across structured, semi-structured, and unstructured information. We welcome the new inmeta operator to the search town!

Posted by Rodrigo Vaca, Enterprise Team

Bom dia! A couple months ago we promised to enable more and more customers around the world to benefit from our enterprise search technologies.

Today we’re delivering another piece of that promise – and a big piece for that matter! We just launched Google Enterprise and announced immediate availability of our enterprise search products in Brazil. It was great to see the interest from customers and the press community alike.

For this launch we partnered with MUDE, BearingPoint, B2Bis, Added and Datacraft – great companies with lots of knowledge of the local market and customers. We’re very excited to have them on board helping customers with their enterprise search needs.

Now, if only the Google Search Appliance could help me find an excuse to make it to Rio around Carnival time… :)

Rodrigo Vaca

Posted by Kevin Smith, Partner Program Manager

Need to extend the reach of your Google Search Appliance to even more systems? Want professional services for your Google enterprise products? Just curious about what our Google Enterprise Professional partners are up to?

Look no further. We're happy to announce the launch of our partner webinar series, with demos, updates, and other information from a variety of our technology and consulting partners. You can find the schedule plus register for individual webinars by pointing your browser to:
www.google.com/enterprise/gsa/live_demos.html

Posted by David Bercovich, Product Marketing Manager

British Airways, the UK's largest international airline, has deployed two Google Search Appliances to help its 48,000 employees find information inside the company. With employees traveling all over the world and working all hours of the day, it is essential for BA to provide always on access to information on their internal network with Google.

And the employees like it. Accoring to Alan Huish BA's employee self-service programme manager, employee self-service satisfaction has risen from 60% to 78% since Google was deployed, and efficiency has improved because information is more readily available. With Google, BA has upgraded search to first class!

Posted by Kevin Gough, Product Marketing Manager

Interested in getting a sneak peak at the latest Google Enterprise products? Want to verify that Google is run by humans and not just really smart robots? Join us in November for a breakfast seminar during our Google Enterprise world tour, where our Enterprise execs will share their thoughts on IT trends and you can learn about Google's enterprise search, geospatial and collaboration offerings first hand from product experts.

We'll be stopping by the following U.S. cities: Cincinnati, Baltimore, Washington DC, New York, Indianapolis, Phoenix, Sacramento, San Diego, San Jose and Austin. Learn more and register to attend.

We'll be in the following European cities: London, Berlin, Munich, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Paris. Learn more and sign up.

Posted by Dave Girouard, Vice President and General Manager, Google Enterprise

We think Jotspot is a hotspot for enterprise.

In the last couple years, JotSpot made a name for itself, as well as for do-it-yourself application publishing -- used by individuals and businesses. JotSpot makes it easy for companies of all sizes to use wikis to collaborate online.

We're excited about what that could mean for our enterprise customers. So, welcome Joe and team.

We look forward to putting those wikis to work.

Posted by Jeff Ragusa, Google Enterprise

We will be hosting a joint webinar with Persistent Systems this Thursday 11/2 at 11:00am PST where they will be demonstrating some of the ways in which they extend the reach of the Google Search Appliance through their Suite of Enterprise Content Connectors. As a Google Enterprise Professional partner, Persistent has spent the past year providing value to our customers by extending the Google Search Appliance deep into enterprise content repositories.

This webinar, jointly hosted by our Google Search Appliance Product Manager Nitin Mangtani, will provide demonstration of end-to-end search scenarios on hidden secure content residing within Lotus Notes and Documentum eRoom. Sign up for it at http://www.google.com/enterprise/gsa/live_demos.html.

Posted by Nitin Mangtani, Product Manager, Enterprise Search

The Google Search Appliance can automatically expand a search-users query by adding synonyms and words with the same stem. For example if a user enters car then search appliance will automatically search for car or cars. Administrators also have ability to custom upload their synonyms file or blacklist certain terms. So if you have a product which was originally called "product abc" and is now called "product xyz" you can create a synonyms file with these terms, as a result any searches for keyword "product abc" will automatically return relevant documents that contain the terms "product abc" or "product xyz". The end-result of query expansion is that search users find richer set of relevant results without having to re-query with different combination of terms.

You can log-in to the administrative console of Google Search Appliance and enable the Query Expansion feature. We provide you with 4 flexible options and these are:
None - This is by default and it disables the query expansion feature completely.
Standard: Enables query expansion, using Google's built-in synonyms.
Local: Enables query expansion, using only the synonyms that you upload to the appliance.
Full: Enables query expansion, using both Google's built-in synonyms and the files that you upload to the appliance.

Here is the example of the custom synonyms file uploaded to search appliance.
#Synonyms file created Oct 2006
#Author: nitinm
product abc = product xyz
FED = federal electronics division
{phone, cell, mobile, telephone}

There are two formats we support for the synonyms file
Format 1: term1 operator term2
In this format:
• term1 consists of one word or multiple words that are separated by single spaces.
• term2 consists of one word or multiple words that are separated by single spaces.
• operator is one of the following:
= Specifies that the words are equivalent. The appliance expands a search query for term1 or term2 by adding the other term.
> Causes the appliance to add term2 when a search query contains term1.

Entry format 2: {term, term, ...}
In this format:
• Each term in the list will be used to expand queries for each other term.
• The use of brackets {} was introduced with the current release

And finally you can create the blacklists file to mark certain words that should not be expanded. The blacklists file is applicable to both Google built-in synonyms and your custom synonyms file.

As you could see from the examples, we provide you a flexible way to create the synonyms file and also let you choose the policies that are applicable to your environment. The Google built-in synonyms file is also very rich and should be enabled. We recommend using the Full option to enable both Google built-in synonym file and your custom synonym file. So besides uploading / enabling new query expansion files, don't forget to enable it in your front end via the admin console.

We look forward to seeing happier search users.

Posted by Rajen Sheth, Product Manager, Google Apps for Education

We officially rolled out Google Apps for Education two weeks ago, and we were delighted to announce the deployment of our applications to Arizona State University. We've really enjoyed hearing the feedback from students and administrators alike. Yesterday, I noticed this endorsement in the University of Virgina Cavalier Daily, and it's great to hear about the enthusiasm within the student base. We look forward to continuing to make the product better and better for our schools.

Posted by Dave Girouard, Vice President and General Manager, Google Enterprise

Google is getting a little federal assistance in the form of MJ Pizzella, who joined the Google Enterprise team this week.

MJ comes to Google from U.S. General Services Administration (GSA), where she led and helped create the Office of Citizen Services and Communications, in Washington, D.C. -- the first information customer service department for the U.S. government. Her worked helped make government more effective, efficient and responsive to citizens, businesses and government employees, and her office served as model for state and international governments.

MJ understands government and appreciates search. And that's a perfect combination to help us extend Google technology to the public sector.

Welcome aboard, MJ

Posted by David Bercovich, Product Marketing Manager

Alacra has announced that they are using the Google Search Appliance to power search behind the Alacra Compliance Web, a vertical search application that enables financial services companies to comply with the litany of regulatory constraints present in that industry. Check out Alacra's press release here.

Posted by Nitin Mangtani, Google Search Appliance Product Manager

We were talking today (well, actually we were IM'ing over Google Talk in response to an email, but thats beside the point) that although there is a lot of interesting information that finds its way to our blog, we haven't been using it as a forum to share with everyone some technical tips and tricks we come across for our enterprise products. So this will mark the first in an ongoing series of "tech tips" for the Google Search Appliance, Google Mini, Google Earth, Google Apps, etc.

One powerful feature of the Google Search Appliance is the ability to create multiple collections. Collections are logical views of information in the index, as defined by URL patterns. This allows you, for example, to index the entire contents of your intranet, but then divide it up into logical groups of content. One approach may be to divide it up functionally, like a collection for Finance, one for HR, Engineering, Sales, Support, etc. However, as you start to break down your content into logical groups, its often necessary to give any one group of users search capabilities across multiple of those collections at the same time. You might want to make it so a sales person not only searches the 'sales' collection, but also searches the 'marketing' collection as well. Or there might be some general content like corporate policies and holiday schedules that should be available to everyone.

For this, you could either create lots of unique collections with duplicate rules, but that requires more ongoing maintenance. Luckily, the Google Search Appliance supports the use of logical AND and OR operators on the collection parameter.

To specify which collection you want to search over, you set the site parameter on the GET request. The following is a simple GET request of the Google Search Appliance where the collection specified is one named 'all_content':

http://search.corp.mycompany.com/search?q=query+string
                        &site=all_content
                        &client=default_frontend
                        &output=xml_no_dtd
                        &proxystylesheet=default_frontend

Now, what if we wanted to do a query and ask for anything in either the 'sales' or 'marketing' collection? You can use the boolean OR [|] operator on the site parameter. So your GET request would be:

http://search.corp.mycompany.com/search?q=query+string
                        &site=sales|marketing
                        &client=default_frontend
                        &output=xml_no_dtd
                        &proxystylesheet=default_frontend

What if you wanted to only return information that was in both the 'engineering' and 'support' collections? You can use the boolean AND [.] operator on the site parameter:

http://search.corp.mycompany.com/search?q=query+string
                        &site=engineering.support
                        &client=default_frontend
                        &output=xml_no_dtd
                        &proxystylesheet=default_frontend

Using the boolean AND [.] and the boolean OR [|] operators can make working with collections more powerful as well as significantly lowering ongoing maintenance efforts as content changes and collection definitions evolve. Give it a shot!

Posted by David Bercovich, Product Marketing Manager

Tens of thousands of sites have created mashups using the Google Maps API. We didn't think it was fair to limit 'mashup mania' to consumers and individuals, so we recently created Google Maps for Enterprise.

Today, we're pleased to announce the availability of Google Maps for Enterprise in France, Italy, Germany, Spain, and the Netherlands. Now, businesses in Europe can leverage Google's award-winning mapping technology to manage assets in the field, view customer locations, plan logistics or view any other information in a geographic context. And of course for users on the corporate network, mashup data stays securely behind the firewall.

Posted by Kevin Smith, Google Enterprise

Yesterday at Educause in Dallas we announced that Blackboard--a major provider of enterprise software to educational institutions--has joined the Google Enterprise Professional program. The combination of Blackboard's education-focused software with Google enterprise search products will help the large number of universities using those products make it easy for their faculty and students to find exactly the information they're looking for.

So far, Blackboard has created several Google OneBox for Enterprise modules for searching course catalogs and other Blackboard sources, as well as completed an integration with Google Scholar. We're looking forward to seeing what other interesting things they do with the Google Search Appliance, Google Mini, and Google Apps for Education.

Posted by James Wang, Google Mini Product Specialist

Yes, I know, you just read that title and now have the Rolling Stones stuck in your head. Well, as you enjoy that mental background music, here's some highlights from a recent review about the Google Mini by Jim Dalrymple from Macworld. Jim heard widespread rumors that the Google Mini was easy to install, and wanted to see if this claim had any truth to it. Here's what he had to say:

"The Mini comes with everything you need to get up and running—the 1U rackmount appliance, a crossover cable, an Ethernet cable and power cord. For the truly challenged among us, Google even colored the cables and the slots they go in to, so that it's nearly impossible to make a mistake."

"It took me about 30 minutes from the time I cracked open the packing tape on the box to the time I did my first search. It was almost too simple—for a while, I wasn't sure I actually finished the complete setup."

"I am impressed with how quickly the box was setup. We all know that Google Search packs a lot of power and it's nice to see the company is able to bring that to small business users in such an easy-to-use box."

We are blushing, Jim. Thank you.

Posted by Noah Doyle, Enterprise Product Manager

Millions of users around the world have used Google Earth to 'fly' around the world and check out everything from Buckingham Palace to their childhood homes.

Believe it or not, Google Earth isn't just for individual exploration of the world. A growing number of companies and government agencies have been using Google Earth's Enterprise solutions to layer their data onto the globe. Energy companies have been particularly enthusiastic in adopting Google Earth Enterprise. With huge amounts of exploration imagery and the need to manage oil rigs, pipelines, equipment etc. all over the world, the energy industry is a natural fit for Google Earth Enterprise.

That is why we are pleased to announce that Spatial Energy has joined the Google Enterprise Professional program as a Google Earth Specialist. Spatial Energy has extensive experience providing imagery solutions to the oil and gas industry, so we are excited to work with them to extend the reach of Google Earth to more oil and gas companies.

Posted by Kevin Smith, Google Enterprise

Inxight, a Google Enterprise Professional partner, has once again released a free complement to Google enterprise search technology. This time it's the Inxight Search Extender for Google Desktop, which combines Inxight's entity extraction and natural-language processing with Google Desktop's search capability. Search results from Google Desktop are automatically clustered on-the-fly, enabling users to filter their results sets by the people, companies, places, concepts and other information contained within them.

Oh yeah--what was Inxight's earlier free offering? A java API wrapper for the Google Search Appliance and the Google Mini, available at http://code.google.com/enterprise/opensource/. While you're there, check out other offerings from developers, or click on "API Documentation" to see some different ways to integrate with Google enterprise search products.

Posted by Jeff Ragusa, Google Enterprise

We're always excited when a developer, customer, or partner takes such great interest in our products and in our community that they spend the time and effort to contribute their own improvements. I've recently had the pleasure of working with software engineer and web standards aficionado Joe D'Andrea who has made it his personal mission to take our Google Search Appliance into the wonderful world of web standards compliance. He's created a new XSLT stylesheet that displays our search results in a way that conforms to the XHTML 1.0 and CSS 2.1 specifications. In doing so he's completely separated the markup from the styling in our default stylesheet.

What does this mean to you? Well for starters it means that you could install this single stylesheet into your Google Search Appliance and provide a search experience that automatically adapts to the device its being viewed on! On a computer screen Joe provides the familar look we all love. On printed paper the astute eye notices some added conveniences. What about a mobile phone? Ok, now we're talking. The drastic transformation into a Google Mobile-like interface seems like magic. But thats nothing. Go ahead and try your favorite text-based or speech-based browser! Ah, there's nothing quite like having your search results read to you like poetic verse...

Read more about the many other benefits in Joe's own blog post. He's published the stylesheet, along with lots of screenshots and notes, as a project on Google's open source hosting platform.

If you would like to contribute to our growing list of open source projects related to our Enterprise products, drop us a note and let us know what interesting things you're working on!

Thanks Joe!

Posted by Kevin Gough, Enterprise Product Marketing Manager

Well according to Ken Yarmosh, author of the TECHNOSIGHT blog, Google product manager Rajen Sheth was "on fire" during his keynote at today's The New New Internet conference. Rajen spoke about Google's approach to developing web-based enterprise software and our new Google Apps for Your Domain offering. Upon hearing Ken's proclamation, Rajen responded, "I'm fired?" No Rajen, quite the opposite. Read Ken's synopsis of Rajen's talk and view a few video clips from it.

Posted by Nitin Mangtani, Search Product Manager

As a product manager it’s always fun to work on cool, interesting technology and then release it to customers. Today we shipped an all-new version of the Google Search Appliance with increased document capacity and some great new features. With this new release, the GB-5005 can now search up to 10 million documents while the GB-8008 can search a whopping 30 million. (By the way, if you ask nicely, we can build them even bigger! Just let us know.)

We also added some cool features such as date and number range search. So now you can restrict your search to only those documents authored between say, January 1st and September 19th 2006. Similarly, when you're looking for that special Digital Camera, you can restrict your search to cameras in the $250 to $1000 price range. My wife would perhaps like me to restrict this search to the $250 to $500 range ;-)

Finally something special for our international friends; we now have our administrative interface, product documentation and search interface available in an additional 10 languages, now totaling 16 languages: Chinese (Simplified & Traditional), Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese (Brazilian), Russian, Spanish, Swedish.

If you are a customer, you can grab the update from our support site. If you aren't yet able to find things inside your enterprise, check out the Google Search Appliance and see if its right for you.

Posted by Jeff Ragusa, Google Enterprise

Xythos Software provides document and file management products for educational institutions, government organizations, and commercial organizations who need secure and easy to use methods to manage and share their information. They just made access to that information even easier for their customers who own a Google Search Appliance by creating a OneBox for Enterprise module.

On October 18th, Xythos will be hosting a web seminar to discuss the module, how it was built, and what it can do for organizations. Our own David Bercovich will join them. You can find out more and sign up for the web seminar on their web site. The OneBox module is available now in our OneBox Gallery.

This accomplishment offers a great example of how any individual or organization can create and publish a useful OneBox module, without even having a Google Search Appliance of their own!

Posted by Andria McCool, Google Enterprise Federal Marketing Manager

I don't know about you, but a few of my favorite things are Google Earth and Stephen Colbert's 435 part series "Better know a District". You can only imagine how excited I was to see that Google Earth has updated its US Government Layer so everyone can know more about their districts! We've updated the congressional boundaries, and added a layer for both US Senators and US Representatives. With embedded search for Google Images – you are only 2 clicks away from a picture of your favorite Representative! Check it out in the latest version of Google Earth!

Posted by Rodrigo Vaca, Enterprise Product Marketing Manager

We're always excited to hear when our enterprise search products help improve employee productivity and reduce costs, especially when those are are taxpayer dollars. The State Services Commission of New Zealand recently set a Google Mini out to do just that, specifically providing top-quality search across their SharePoint portal.

"We needed a product to replace our legacy search tool. It had to be simple to integrate with the SharePoint Services sites which make up the PSI, and be as user friendly as possible. An excellent search function is vital to the PSI and the Google Mini functionality fulfilled all the criteria," said State Services deputy commissioner of ICT Laurence Millar.

We couldn't agree more... happy searching!

Posted by Kevin Gough, Google Enterprise

This week, Google applications won in four out of six categories and got runner up in a fifth category in Forbes' review of the best web-based applications for SMBs. Google winners included Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Notebook and Google Spreadsheets. These accolades came only a week after we launched Google Apps for Your Domain, our suite of integrated productivity tools that includes Gmail and Google Calendar. If the whole is better than the sum of its parts, then Google Apps for Your Domain is going to make SMBs even more effective and given really positive initial feedback, we hope that it too finds a place in the winners circle next year.

Posted by Jeff Ling, Enterprise Product Solutions Engineer

We just released the Windows Access Connector Sample Code. It provides an implementation framework of the SAML based security SPI. A customized authentication and authorization implementation can be provided as simple as a single class, where the rest of the communication with the appliance has already been handled. It gives a solid implementation of the abstract SAML protocol.

This Access Connector also provides sample code to do Windows Integrated Authentication using the Google Search Appliance SAML SPI. It is now included as the default security implementation of this sample code. It uses the features provided by Windows kerberos extension to allow authenticated domain users to search secure intranet documents seamlessly.

Take a look and let us know what you think. The project is open source and available from our Enterprise developer site at http://code.google.com/enterprise.

Posted by Mike Bradshaw, Head of Federal for Google Enterprise

For years now, Google has been providing high-powered, user-friendly information systems to the U.S. Government. From visualizing the world in rich 3D images with Google Earth Enterprise to finding information inside agencies with the Google Search Appliance and most recently providing citizens with high-quality, Google search across government information on the Internet with Google U.S. Government Search, these systems are used by government employees and citizens alike. We're excited to be recognized as the most influential commercial company providing technology to the federal IT market by one of the most influential federal IT publications, Federal Computer Week.

You can learn more out our federal solutions.

You won’t find any unhealthy food at Whole Foods and from now on finding a Whole Foods near you is easier than hitting the fast food joint on the corner – using the new store finder powered by Google Maps for Enterprise. Type in your zip code (or select your city) and you’ll see a Google Map showing the Whole Foods locations near you including address, hours and store website. Now you have no excuse when your mother complains that you are not eating well!

Last week we added our 100th Google Enterprise Professional partner worldwide. And while the milestone is absolutely a reason to celebrate, it's not all about quantity--the breadth and expertise of our partners is what really makes this program (and our customers) successful.

We now have a whole range of partners...
- Small consultancies handling things like secure search and web design
- Large integrators combining the Google Search Appliance with content management systems, portals, and other enterprise applications behind the firewall
- ISVs building connectors to extend the reach of Google search
- Application vendors leveraging Google search, including having their solutions be "Powered by Google"
- Geospatial integrators helping with deployments of Google Earth Enterprise

And our partners are all over the globe, helping customers in North America, Europe, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand.

Customers are even getting in on the act, developing OneBox modules to make dynamic business information more accessible (just like our partners are doing). Best of all, our customers are getting the services and solutions they need.

To see our growing list of partners, visit the "Partners" section of the Google Enteprise website: http://www.google.com/enterprise/gep.

Since we launched Gmail two years ago, many users have been asking us if they can use Gmail as their regular work e-mail. We understand why - in the corporate environment, the average employee gets about 10 times more mail than the average consumer! With that much e-mail – most users want the speed, storage space, simple-yet-rich user interface and the ability to search messages in a snap that Gmail provides.

Well, let me let you in a little secret and some big news.

The little secret is that I've been using a "special" version of Gmail as my work e-mail client for a while now. Having used regular e-mail clients all my life, I was a little skeptical about the web mail solution. But it took me little time to realize the benefits. Not only the everywhere access (since it's web-based), but there's no more "foldering" at the end of the day, finding e-mails and attachments is a snap and... well, the speed! My inbox holds about 10 gigs of mail, and it's still as fast as when it was empty. Try that with your regular e-mail client!

Now the big news… today we're announcing the launch of Google Apps for Your Domain, a combination of GMail + Calendar + Talk that small organizations can brand, customize and use. And this is just the start! We expect to release an enterprise version by the end of the year that will have the functionality larger organizations require.

Isn't it time everyone at work loves their e-mail, just like they love Gmail?

We couldn't have said it better ourselves:

"I can guarantee one thing: you will keep making more files, and losing track of them, every day. And whether you buy a search tool tomorrow or never, getting a grip on your files will save you time and money."

The above quote is from Network World small business networking columnist James Gaskin; from his latest column, "Find that file fast" whereby he discusses the Google Mini and additional search tools small businesses should consider in helping manage an ever-growing amount of data. We concur with Mr. Gaskin's prognostication: we're seeing more small business customers who not only need to index more data on their intranets and web sites, but also different types of data (HTML, PDF, Office docs, etc) that can be found quickly. And our Google Mini customers are proof that as small business websites, intranets and file shares grow, their search accuracy, response and benefits can thrive, not diminish.

The Google Enterprise Professional program is now on four continents! In addition to partners in North America, Europe, and Japan, we now proudly welcome Australia to our enterprise partner family.

More specifically, web services company Panalysis has signed on to help our customers in Australia and New Zealand get even more out of their Google Search Appliance and Google Mini deployments. Panalysis has extensive experience with web analytics (including Google Analytics, of course!), optimization, websites, and intranets. Also, with a focus on user experience, they're a great fit for Google. We're excited to have them on board and excited to be breaking new ground down under!

A boon to academics everywhere, the Chicago Manual of Style chose to use the Google Mini to power search in its first online version, coming out next month. Previously harried college students had to first find the Manual of Style under a pile of laundry then leaf through dog-eared sections to find information. Now they can now get instant information on how to properly cite sources such as online articles without page numbers - making Wikipedia and MySpace the #1 and #2 most popular reference sources for the under 25 set. And because of the Google Mini's automated spell checker, they can even misspell "parenthetical citation." We won't tell their high school English teachers.

I came across a nice article that accurately frames the challenges with security and search in the enterprise. The first in a series from New Idea Engineering, the piece titled "Mapping Security Requirements to Enterprise Search - Part 1: Defining Specific Security Requirements" gives a good overview of the various types of deployment options and security decisions organizations have to make when deploying search across the enterprise.

Security continues to be one of the more challenging parts of every enterprise search deployment. Most enterprise content systems weren't designed with high powered, sub-second, secure search in mind. The Google Search Appliance handles all types of security environments from NTLM to LDAP to Single Sign-On to X.509 to SAML. We continue to work with the industry leaders in the security and access control space to help solve this problem in a scalable and easy to deploy manner.

I look forward to the next article in New Idea's series.

When it comes to evaluating technology products, who would know better than Ziff Davis -- with two dozen web sites, and between 11 and 12 millions unique visitors a month to popular destinations such as pcmagazine.com and eweek.com?

That's why we're especially proud that when it came time for Ziff Davis to select a search product for themselves, they selected the Google Search Appliance.

"The goal of search is the same as the goal of our websites: connecting people to the information they need as quickly as possible," says Jason Young, president of consumer and small business for Ziff Davis Media. "We have made a marked leap forward with the Google Search Appliance by bringing more relevant content to the forefront."

It is a marked leap both in relevancy and in advanced search capabilities. Working with LTech Consulting, a Google Enterprise Professional partner, consumers can now refine searches and drill down within dynamically generated categories -- such as the specific price of a camera on pcmag.com.

While search results are better, so was the process of achieving them. "Once you have the Google Search Appliance installed, it requires little – if any – human intervention," says Nino Tasca, director of Internet Technology for Ziff Davis. "That has saved us countless hours in comparison to our previous search product."

Thanks Ziff Davis, for yet another valuable review.

From his talking Trans Am on the television show Knight Rider to his suped-up patrol boat on Baywatch, David Hasselhoff clearly has an eye for performance machines in sleek packages. That's why, when he stopped by Google's London office this week, he was excited to take the Google Search Appliance out for a spin with our UK sales manager, Robert Whiteside. Add an oscillating red light to the front of the appliance, and we think it's ready for a cameo in David's latest video.

If you thought walking and chewing gum at the same time was hard, try walking and searching your corporate information! But wait...now that the new Google Search Appliance Mobile edition has hit the streets, you can do just that. Access your enterprise info while on the go, including searching your corporate network, databases, various content management systems, and your public website. You can even leverage our Google OneBox for Enterprise technology to get real-time info from a range of other business applications!

To make this even more useful, we’ve partnered with Motorola to integrate enterprise search powered by the Google Search Appliance with the next generation of the MOTOPRO Mobility Suite.

A recent reader poll at ITWire found that 88 percent of respondents consider Google a serious threat to Microsoft's corporate search business.

We like to think of it more as an alternative, than a threat. But we're still glad so many people agree.

The article also said, "analysts believe the experience that users are getting typing natural language queries into the Google search box on the web will translate to natural language searching for corporate records, rather than users drilling down through applications and directories to find records."

That's something users have been telling us for years. We're glad the analysts now agree.

As a product management intern with the Enterprise team this summer, I've seen a number of Mini customers use its reporting features to optimize their site and search - with great results - and it seems like a no-brainer to me to enable our customers to go a step further, using Google Analytics. Analytics is a sophisticated and free web analytics product that provides both key integrations with Google Adwords and comprehensive reporting on visitor behavior, content performance and e-commerce. Google Analytics is an easy-to-use, web-based system designed to reveal how users interact with your site and to help you improve your web presence. More often than not, we're finding that the customers who are concerned about search performance and who are purchasing Minis are the same customers who are turning around and using real usage data to optimize their websites.

So after only about a month here, I'm really excited to announce the completion of my first project - the distribution of free Google Analytics accounts to all current Google Search Appliance and Google Mini owners!

Google Analytics will help Enterprise customers answer questions like:

"What is my most popular content, the new product pages for our big release or the company party pictures?"

"Which Adwords are the most profitable, and which campaigns are best?"

"How popular is our user registration process, and how often do those who sign up then purchase a product? Or are users just after the free content?"

"We've heard internationalization is a good thing – but where are our visitors coming from and what technologies are they using to access our site? Wouldn't it be neat if we could visualize all of these visitors on a world map?"

If you're a customer, you can locate your very own account code by signing into your http://support.google.com/enterprise account and clicking on the Profile link on the left-side bar. Once you retrieve your account code, go to https://www.google.com/analytics/home/ and click on the "Sign Up Now" link. Upon filling in your account details and pressing the "Create my account," button, you'll be given the ability to enter your Analytics account code. Also on http://support.google.com/enterprise, you'll find a brief document which summarizes the advantages of Google Analytics and how to pair it with the Mini.

With the combination of the Google Mini or Search Appliance and Google Analytics, I expect we'll see a ton more success stories like the great ones in these customer videos.

Keep checking back!

-Matt Kulick

Its just not fair. Information Technology (IT) departments seem to always get the short end of the stick when it comes to being "liked" inside the company. In the absolute best case, when everything is going perfectly, they go unnoticed. In the more normal case, they are the "bad guys" who either can't give users what they want, or worse yet -- ban products and services that users bring into the workplace.

In his recent article, In Depth: Is Centralized IT Killing Tech Innovation?, Thomas Claburn of InformationWeek takes on this interesting topic looking at the problem from both sides. Our own Dave Girouard is also quoted from his recent talk at the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium.

BusinessObjects' Crystal Reports business reporting tool and their BusinessObjects XI platform allows many organizations to access, analyze, and more intelligently use the information in their ERP systems and data warehouses.

BusinessObjects' desire to make information useful and their focus on the user made them a natural fit for a partnership with us. As a first step in that partnership, they've opened up their vault of information to Google Search Appliance users by creating an integration kit to allow inclusion of their content in Google search results.

They've created both a OneBox module and a content feeder for the Google Search Appliance that will allow Crystal Reports, Intelligence documents, and Dashboards from your BusinessObjects BI platform to be incorporated seemlessly into search results.

For good measure, they've also written a Google Desktop plug-in so you can find that Crystal Report you've saved but forgot to publish.

Obviously we're excited about this growing partnership and the value it'll bring to our users.

Nothing makes us prouder than hearing about the experiences customers have with our products.

We just happened to notice a blog post by Rob, a webmaster in Steenwijk, Netherlands. In his post, Rob does a thorough review of his experience implementing a Google Mini for his website – everything from unpacking it, setting it up, to crawling and tweaking the results page UI. So if you’re curious about the Google Mini, we encourage you to read about Rob’s experience. My favorite line in the blog is the one that says: “The Google Mini really lives up to its expectations. It was great fun to do.”. Thanks Rob - that’s great to hear!

Rodrigo

Ever since we launched Google OneBox for Enterprise as a new feature of the Google Search Appliance, interested users have been asking us for ways to access even more dynamic enterprise content. Now, Information Builders, one of our longest-standing enterprise partners, has answered the call by putting together a pair of OneBox modules to add to our growing collection.

IBI's WebFOCUS module interacts with their business intelligence system, allowing users to access WebFOCUS business intelligence reports, database records and real-time messages directly from their Google Search Appliance UI.

IBI's second module taps into their iWay Universal Adapter Suite. With a little customized setup for specific applications, iWay's module will allow users to access content from any application, database, content management system, custom application system or legacy transaction system that iWay's adapter suite can access. All from the Google Search Appliance.

To access these modules plus any others in our module gallery, check out:
http://code.google.com/enterprise

A lot of people use Lotus Notes. And now users can access and search more of their Notes content directly from the Google Search Appliance. Persistent Systems, a recently announced Google Enterprise Professional partner, has just released their new IBM Lotus Notes Connector. This connector, when combined with the Google Search Appliance, allows users to search pretty much all of their Lotus Notes content.

The new connector provides the ability to browse through a configured Lotus Notes content hierarchy of servers, databases and documents. This enhances the reading of structured and unstructured documents in Lotus Notes, plus passes them to the Google Search Appliance for indexing purposes. The connector also includes the ability to fetch attachments, detect changes, and handle authenticated search, which fits well with our paradigm of secure, efficient search.

To learn more about the Persistent IBM Lotus Notes Connector and how it can help complete the universal search picture for your business, check out:
http://www.persistentsys.com/products/enterprisecontentsearch/enterprisecontentsearch_google.htm

Traditionally finding information embedded in Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server (SPS) and Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) sites has not been that easy. SharePoint search uses SQL Server full text search internally. If a WSS site uses SQL Server as a content database, then it's available for search. However, if a site uses SQL Desktop Engine (the free, included one) it's out of luck.

Can Google Search Appliance help? You bet. The Appliance can crawl SharePoint directly, whether it uses SQL Desktop Engine or not. However, depending on the design of a SharePoint site, Google Search Appliance could face some difficulties. For example, sites buried under other sites might be "hidden" due to lack of direct links to them. That's why we have developed a little tool that will solve these challenges and enable thorough document discovery. This sample connector also pushes embedded meta data into the search index, allowing for advanced querying and fielded search. For example, a site designer defined several important attributes for a document library. By using the connector, these attributes will be treated as meta data of these documents.

This SharePoint connector is written in Java, and uses SharePoint's web services. It's not intrusive - you don't have to install anything on your SharePoint server or sites. You can run it from a single machine and retrieve any SharePoint site in the enterprise. The connector works with both SharePoint Portal Server and Windows SharePoint Services. If WSS sites are created by a SPS site or linked to it, the connector can discover them. If not, you can always tell the connector to point to them. It can enable indexing of all the personal sites inside SPS, both public and private content. It can access Google Search Appliance and SharePoint Server sites through separately configured proxy servers. It supports both basic and NTLM authentication for secured search, as does the appliance.

To give it a try or to get more details on this connector, including the source code, check out the SharePoint Connector Code Sample download on the Google Enterprise developer community.

After his keynote at the MIT CIO Symposium this week, our very own Dave Girouard (VP & GM of Enterprise) sat down with the editor-in-chief of eWeek to talk about the growing importance of search in business, Google's plans for the enterprise, and even a bit about the Boston Red Sox. Go here to listen to the podcast.

G'day Mates! We're excited to announce that we just launched our search appliances in Australia and New Zealand. Ever since we announced the Google Search Appliance and the Google Mini we've gotten constant inquiries from customers down under who wanted to provide Google-quality search across their corporate networks and websites.

Google's approach of providing a complete enterprise search solution - in an appliance - rather than selling just the software means that customers can be up and runnin' and searchin' in little time after unpacking the box. But it also means that we as a company have to go through demanding tests and government processes for importing hardware into a new market. Anyway, we cleared all that and we're happy that now we can answer all those "I want my Google Mini!" demands!

Our customers elsewhere might be asking, "when can I get my hands on the Google Search Appliance?" Well, the answer is: soon! We're working hard to make sure ALL of you can enjoy great enterprise search just as you enjoy Google's web search.

Rodrigo Vaca

For almost a year, the Google Maps API has been available for free, public-facing sites. A remarkable variety of websites (over 30,000 in number) have already integrated Google’s mapping technology using this API. Including our own. Check out the Google Mini Map here. These sites and organizations know the value of adding geographic context to data. But we’ve heard from many organizations that want to use Google mapping technology behind the firewall or for web-based enterprise applications.

Today, as part of Geo Developer Day at Google, we launched Google Maps for Enterprise. Now companies and government agencies can use Google Maps to help their business go geo. Now you can provide all the Google Maps features that users love -- such as the ability to drag maps in the browser and view satellite imagery. That means whether you’re displaying customer data on a map, managing assets in the field, or delivering a location-finder to your customers or partners, Google Maps integrates with your data to provide a truly compelling user experience.

We at Google have teamed up with Inxight Software, one of our Google Enterprise Professional partners, to make it even easier to find documents, discover trends and find information within documents in the enterprise. To complement Google enterprise search capabilities, Inxight has created the Inxight Search Extender, an easy-to-install application that integrates with both the Google Search Appliance and Google Desktop for Enterprise. As our customers have experienced, the Google Search Appliance provides Google-quality search across your web servers, file systems, portals, content management systems and relational databases. Now, the Inxight Search Extender for Google integrates with the Google Search Appliance to enable users to filter search results sets and more easily navigate through documents, seeing at-a-glance automatically extracted people, companies, places, and other information. The result is that you can get more value from your information.

To help explain this powerful combination of technologies, we're jointly hosting a free webinar next week.

We recognize the need to leverage the vertical and technical expertise of 3rd parties in extending the reach of search deeper into corporate networks. As a result the Google Enterprise Professional partner program has grown tremendously since its inception. Its a no brainer for the partner as they get to market and sell value added services and solutions they've integrated with the Google Search Appliance. And Google gets to provide its users with great search access to a broader set of enterprise information. Win-win.

Less brouhaha, however, is made of a more subtle phenomena that we're starting to notice. For our partners, adding the power of a Google Search Appliance to a solution or product can provide fast and relevant search, but it can also uncover new challenges and customer requirements as the scope of their customer relationship expands. This can lead to new opportunities where the partner can certainly choose to increase their footprint. In many cases, however, this results in our partners talking to each other and we're seeing them leverage each other's services and form complementary relationships where they can go in together and provide a more complete interdependent solution for their collective customers. There's the portal solution provider who seeks help from a security services firm to deal with new access control requirements on previously unsearchable restricted document stores. And the professional services firm who, while deploying a custom user interface for a search appliance, joins forces with a software vendor who's created an appliance connector for the customer's legacy system. There's the systems integrator who cooperates with the business intelligence vendor to help their customer realize the benefits of a single interface for information access and decision making.

In many cases the Google Search Appliance provides the interface that brings together disparate systems and business applications that would never have otherwise worked together. Now we're bringing together partner solution providers, application vendors, and integrators who would never have otherwise worked together. We're happy to make the world a more cooperative place, and its a nice side effect that this teamwork ultimately results in an improved user experience.

It's always gratifying to see your efforts rewarded. This review of the Google Mini by Small Business Computing brings back some memories of when we designed the product.

When we built the new Mini, we wanted to make sure we were creating a product which fit the needs of small and medium businesses. In fact, to validate that we were satisfying these businesses, we hit the road to test it out. We would literally throw a Mini in my trunk, drive to a local business, and watch them set it up. We really tried to optimize the out-of-box experience to not only make it easy to set up but also make customers excited to use it. As we did these studies, we'd smile with delight when they understood the UI, and, sometimes, we'd cringe when they ran into a roadblock. We'd then come back to the office and design ways to alleviate the roadblocks.

By the time we released the product, we thought that we had a winner - easy to use and meeting the business needs of companies. But, it was nice to see Small Business Computing validate this with their recent review of the new Mini. We're glad to see this, but we're not done. Today, it's back to the office to make the Mini even better.

A single search box for all your enterprise content? That goal moved a major step closer for Documentum users last week, when Sword, one of our key partners in Europe, announced a connector between the Google Search Appliance and Documentum. With just an in-house Google Search Appliance and Sword's new connector, enterprise information seekers can now securely search for information in their Documentum system along with the rest of their enterprise information. Pretty cool stuff.

Sword, a global solutions provider and one of our earliest enterprise partners in Europe, is an expert on both Documentum and the Google Search Appliance. For details on their connector, check out http://www.sword-group.com.

Today's AIIM Expo begins with Dave Girouard telling attendees that search is no longer the last place people go to find information inside a company. More often, it is the first place they start.

Dave's keynote on "Search to Start. Not to Find" demonstrates how consumer expectation now drives innovation in IT, and discusses ways companies can embrace this change for better information access.

The keynote is one of many events putting Google search front and center at the AIIM Expo -- described as the world's largest and most important annual event for the enterprise content and information management industry.

• In the last seven months, Google Enterprise has added 75 partners to the Google Enterprise Professional program.

• In the Google Partner Pavilion, a number of Google Enterprise Professional Program partners will demonstrate how they are extending Google search technology deeper into enterprise applications.

• A series of partner announcements illustrate new functional for enterprise search inside of business. These include:
• BusinessObjects
• CH2M HILL
• Information Builders
• MetaCarta
• Sapient
• Sword

These partner announcements will mean an improved search experience for business users and enhanced functionality for corporations. For example Sword, a global solutions provider, is announcing the GSA Connector for Documentum, the first connector for the Google Search Appliance that enables secure, direct indexing of content within EMC Documentum's market leading ECM platform. Sword, in close partnership with Google and lead by Olivier Colinet, technical lead for the Sword connector work, has developed a world-class solution to bring Google-powered search to the large ECM repositories inside corporations, helping fulfill the vision of simple, secure, unified enterprise search.

Innovation should never be at the expense of user simplicity. And we thank all our partners for embracing and promoting that idea, and helping to make enterprise search better for all business. We look forward to seeing all the cool, and innovative things that the partner and developer community can do with search in the enterprise.

Most enterprise search vendors admit that their algorithms provide generally poor results. To compensate, they ask customers to "tune" the search algorithms to meet their specific needs. Sounds good so far, right? In reality, this customer-implemented "tuning" in the context of enterprise search involves significant manual work to create the relevancy algorithm. Common methods employed are boosting metadata terms during indexing, boosting specific documents via scripts or formulas, and boosting specific term weightings at query time. These and other approaches require a significant amount of manual programming work on behalf of the customer, are often based on trial and error approaches, and are just hard to maintain. After all, do you want to run your business or get your Ph.D. in search?

The biggest problem with this "tuning" approach is the complexity of administering the code and scripts. Search administrators, representing the needs of thousands of users in their organization, must manually assign weights or boosts to specific metadata, documents, or query terms. These assignments are made through complex configuration scripts and algorithms that must be coded into the engine. Anytime a value is modified, the engine must be restarted, and sometimes the content re-indexed. Therefore, tuning search is a bit like the Butterfly Effect. In the classic example, mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz asks: If a butterfly beats its wings in Brazil, will it set off a tornado in Texas?

Well, tuning search in the enterprise can likewise set off a tornado of search results chaos! Using these technologies, the act of "tuning" is actually more comparable to building your own search algorithm. We at Google, on the other hand, recognize that search is a complex science with hundreds of factors that must be taken into account. The Google Search Appliance leverages the work of thousands of engineers to get the correct answer, right out of the box, with no "tuning" required. The system also adapts to the needs of your enterprise, taking into account corpus specific factors and learning how users query, when they misspell words, and how often content is changing.

So we recommend you focus your efforts on more business-style tuning, including creating intuitive user interfaces, uploading your companies unique acronyms and vocabulary as synonyms and suggested queries, and promoting key results using KeyMatch. The Google Search Appliance will take care of the rest, providing fast, secure, and accurate access to information throughout your enterprise.

Today, Google released Google Desktop 4, the next generation desktop search and information application for users. Building on a great thing, Google Desktop 4 added Google Gadgets - visually slick mini-applications that run on your desktop or in your sidebar for delivering specific topical information. We applaud our friends on the desktop team who continue to bring rapid innovation to the user experience in both the consumer and enterprise world.

But, along with the sizzle comes some of the more mundane features that you can't look at or touch (or move around your desktop), but are key to providing the highest quality, most secure information solution in the enterprise. With version 4 of Google Desktop, we have simplified and enhanced the security capabilities to help ensure that no information leaves your enterprise network. When Google Desktop introduced the Search Across Computers feature, there was concern about unintentional transmission of corporate information outside the corporate network. And although we offer group policy settings to fully disable the Search Across Computers feature for both enterprise and consumer versions of the product, we heard feedback from some business customers that they wanted an easier way.

Therefore, we're pleased to announce the Search Across Computer network disable feature. This allows network administrators to block a particular URL, at the network level, that will disable Search Across Computers entirely.

Our goal is to provide a great user experience while maintaining corporate security and conforming to your policies. So give the new Google Desktop 4 a spin, and thanks for all the great feedback.

The Executive Editor of CIO Insight Dan Briody recently interviewed Dave Girouard, VP & GM of Google Enterprise, about what Google is doing to improve search inside of business, what CIOs are asking for, and what's next. Read the full transcript of the discussion at CIO Insight.

We launched a new version of the Google Search Appliance today with a feature called Google OneBox for Enterprise. Ever search on Google for a stock ticker or the weather and get the information right in the search results? Well, Google OneBox for Enterprise works the same way - giving you access to information from business applications such as your contact database, calendar, CRM or BI system. Check out Dave Girouard'’s blog post for more on how this works.

We're thrilled with the impressive list of partners (Cognos, Oracle, Cisco, Salesforce.com, SAS and many others) who have already created OneBox modules. Take a peek at this video to hear some of our partners talk about why they think a Google search box is a great way to reach their applications.

And last but certainly not least, the Google Mini grew up a bit today -- well, in a sense. The new Google Mini is half the size and weight of its predecessor but is chock full of features like unlimited collections, a continuous crawler and up to 25 queries per second query capacity.

It's always refreshing when a business creates something new and useful and then releases it to the open source community. So I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Inxight Software, one of our Google Enterprise Professional partners, for doing just that. The team at Inxight has created a Java wrapper for the Google Search Appliance's XML API and posted it as a project on SourceForge. Check out details (and download a copy).

(guarda sotto per la versione italiana)

IW Bank just launched a redesign of their website centered around their Google-powered site search. As one of the leading online brokerage firms in Italy, IW Bank recognizes that search is the easiest way for their visitors to find information.

In preparation for the launch of their new site, last week, they counted down the time to redesign. For those of you who aren’t fluent in Italian, ‘Investiamo nella ricerca’ means ‘We invest in search’ and ‘5 giorni 11.18.39’ is a countdown to their search launch – 5 days, 11 hours, 18 minutes and 39 seconds!

We really like their new layout and think it employs some design principles from another popular website.

...ed ora in italiano:

IWBank ha appena lanciato la nuova versione del sito web istituzionale interamente incentrata sulle funzionalita' di ricerca offerte dalla Google Search Appliance. Tra i leader italiani del trading online, IWBank dimostra come il motore di ricerca Google sia la modalita' piu' veloce e facile per permettere ai propri utenti di trovare le informazioni desiderate.

La scorsa settimana, preparandosi al lancio del nuovo sito, hanno fatto il conto alla rovescia in attesa del nuovo motore Google utilizzando il simpatico teaser "Investiamo nella ricerca".

Ci e' piaciuto davvero il loro nuovo layout e riteniamo che utilizzi egregiamente alcuni principi di design tipici di un altro famoso sito web ;-)

Ever imagine gathering a whole bunch of Google partners under one roof? Interested in learning more about extending Google-quality search across your corporate network? Want to take home some colorful Google swag? Together with AIIM, the world's largest content management tradeshow, we've created a Google Enterprise partner pavilion at AIIM's annual shindig.

Dave Girouard, VP & GM of Google Enterprise, will deliver the May 17 keynote. In our partner pavilion, attendees will be able to see presentations from us and our partners on topics ranging from integration with CMS to enabling enterprise desktop search. What are you doing May 16-18? Ever been to Philadelphia? We hope to see you there.

There's a common misconception that the single factor in Google's relevancy algorithms is link structure (also described as PageRank). And since the enterprise environment doesn't typically have the same link structure found on the Web, the presumption goes, Google search must not work well in the enterprise environment.

Let's set the record straight. Google's enterprise search algorithms rely on hundreds of factors to determine relevancy. PageRank is one of a number of document quality variables that, combined with factors that measure how well the query matches each document, determine the right result for a user. By no means is PageRank the only (or dominant) factor in determining which results are the most relevant. Those of us on the quality engineering team have been coming up with new ideas since 1998; the best of them have ended up in our ranking algorithms.

But we're not comfortable with theoretical arguments, so don't take our word for it. We surveyed the customers of our yellow box, the Google Search Appliance, and here's what they had to say:

• About 75% of customers responding switched to Google from another search provider's product
• Over 50% of customers responding switched to Google due to poor relevancy from their prior search provider
• Over 90% would recommend the Google Search Appliance to another company like theirs

In case you missed it, some Raytheon search experts presented their findings on an enterprise search evaluation at the Semantic Technology Conference. They ultimately chose Google to provide integrated enterprise search across their desktop and network content repositories. Most impressive was the response from their user base who participated in the survey: 84% found the "right" answer (the answer they were looking for) in the top 3 results.

Let's be clear - there's plenty more to do. We're happy to see that a large majority of users are easily finding what they're looking for. It's just that we believe we can do better. Eighty-four percent still means 3 out of 20 queries aren't optimal, and we're not satisfied with that. But we also believe that asking each customer to write their own relevancy algorithms would amount to surrendering and saying "here, you try!" Instead, we're working closely with customers and partners to assess where and when our algorithms work best, and where they need improvement. We welcome you to join us and help improve enterprise search for everyone.

David Elworthy, Lead Engineer
Enterprise Search Quality Team

Why do I look so smug? No, it's not because I just saved a bunch of money on my car insurance. In fact, I just figured out a way to save you a bunch of money on a Google Mini.

OK, in all seriousness (if you can take me seriously now), I'm happy because we're releasing a lower-cost version of the Google Mini that indexes up to 50,000 documents for $1995.

When we launched the Google Mini last year, our vision was to make Google-quality search available to businesses everywhere at an affordable, transparent price. We believe that search is critical for every business, both for customers finding information on a public web site as well as employees finding documents within an organization. Users are now used to navigating information via search, so they tend to expect great search wherever there is information.

Since our launch, we've strived to cut costs and continually pass these savings on to our customers. But, in keeping with our goal to satisfy our users, we've made this change without affecting the quality of the product or services we deliver. Customers will get the same great software, hardware, and support that they have come to expect from us, but at a lower price.

So for the price of a good office chair, you can get great search for your office. Learn more here