Web search leader Google is hoping to rev up lackluster sales in the enterprise search market with an updated hardware and software package that promises faster and more comprehensive results for corporations, governments and universities.
The new box is the first upgrade for Google's enterprise search appliance since the appliance was launched two years ago, and it marks a significant boost in performance, according to David Girouard, the general manager of Google's enterprise division. The new system is bigger, with more processing power and memory, allowing a single box to index up to 1.5 million documents and 300 queries per minute, fivefold increases over the earlier model, he said. The boxes cost between $32,000 and $175,000 each, depending on the configuration.
Girouard also touted software improvements such as secure sign-on, which limits queries to only those documents that a particular employee is authorized to see. In addition, the new system continuously crawls corporate intranets seeking out and updating only new documents and changes in existing documents. The previous system used a less efficient batch-crawling technique, Girouard said, which updated the entire index once every two or three days. Google dominates Web search, but it has struggled to transplant its success seamlessly to the business of simplifying document searches for corporations. Significantly, some of the techniques that have made the company a household name for serving up fast and relevant Web results don't work in the vastly different arena of corporate intranets.
News source: C|net
