Overview: Google
Google is perhaps the best -known name in search, and because of their outstanding reputation the Google Search Appliance enjoys excellent success in many environments; and users seem to think highly of its relevance.
We tend to categorize search technology based on its sweet spot. On the internet, Google excels because it understands the interconnection between pages based on links between them; and it ranks page and site relevance partly based on links into and out of that site. Google determines the authoritativeness of a site based on links into that site; and the more authoritative a site is, the higher its pages tend to be ranked.
There is no question that, for the Google Search Appliance, the sweet spot is highly interlinked content. If your company web content looks like the web - mostly HTML, PDF, and text - Google's GSA will be a strong candidate. And Google has provided a number of features and capabilities to the GSA to make it a better fit in the corporate environment: database connectivity, secure access, federation, improved relevancy tuning and basic search analytics and reporting. And third-party add-ons from partners provide even more connectivity and capability. The GSA has also provided innovation in enterprise search with capabilities like wiki results, which adds an element of social tagging to search activity.
Products
Google offers two versions of the search appliances: the Google Mini, and the Google Search Appliance. They also provide Google Site Search, a hosted service not unlike SearchButton.com which we founded back in 1998.
The Google Mini, the blue box, is an entry-level appliance that can provide search for up to 300,000 documents. It provides many of the capabilities you'd expect, including support for multiple document types and multiple languages, relevance tuning based on freshness and source, and support for synonyms. The price, while subject to change, runs from $2990US to $9990US, depending on the number of documents you need to index.
The Mini is a cool little box, and provides a pretty good solution for many companies. However, if you need to search database content, or need connectors or advanced reporting, you may need to look at the Google Search Appliance.
The Google Search Appliance, Google's yellow box, comes in a variety of styles and sizes based on capacity and failover requirements. The entry box, the GB-1001, supports up to 3 million documents with a rich set of capabilities. Different models exist, including a rack of servers with automatic clustering and failover for up to 30 million documents. Custom solutions can support even higher document loads.
A major advantage of the GSA over the Mini is the ability to search database content, and to access external data with federators and provide a rich set of user features. Some of these tend to be standard on most enterprise search engines, including automatic spell check, result clustering, advanced Boolean query support, and enterprise single sign-on security.
One other option available from Google is called Google Site Search, which is a good hoisted solution for companies for public data for companies with no central IT staff. Google Site Search starts at $100 per year for 1000 documents, and can grow to over 100,000 documents for an annual fee of $20000US. A pretty good deal when all you need is simple search of public content.
Summary
With all of the Google expertise, they are still missing some of the capabilities that companies with high-end search requirements expect. For example, there is no way to submit a document and guarantee it will be indexed immediately and no way to implement custom relevance algorithms. There are also no hooks to index external meta-data as part of a document - for example, to include a current stock price quote whenever a ticker symbol appears in a document. And thus far there is no entity extraction, sentiment analysys, or faceted navagation capability in the Google offerings.
Still, Google has excellent offerings for many environments. If you are considering a Google solution, we can help you determine whether the Google appliances are a good fit for you; and if so, which model you should consider. Email your questions to Dr Search, or give us a call at +1 408-446-3460.