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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.