Enterprise tools added to Google Search Appliance

Computerworld - Google upgraded its Search Appliance for the enterprise to help workers find information stored anywhere in their organizations.

Google Search Appliance 7.0, which went on sale Oct. 16, is designed to allow administrators to add information from the cloud, social networking sites, secure storage sites on the Web, and Microsoft SharePoint 2010 files. It works with PCs, tablets and smartphones.

Among other improvements, "we've refined our relevance signals," said Matthew Eichner, general manager of Enterprise Search at Google, in a blog post. "Entity Recognition automatically identifies and suggests content you might be looking for," he noted, adding that GSA 7.0 also allows employees to add their own search results.

A new document preview feature allows users to see thumbnails and full-screen document previews alongside their search results.

IDC analyst David Schubmehl said users would like enterprise searches to be as easy as Web searches, noting that slow searches can hurt productivity. A 2009 IDC study found that the time spent searching for data averaged 8.8 hours per week per employee, at a cost of $14,209 per worker per year.

This version of this story was originally published in Computerworld's print edition. It was adapted from an article that appeared earlier on Computerworld.com.

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