Google for the enterprise

Available in three models, the new Google Search Appliance is described as an integrated hardware/software search product that enables corporations, universities and government agencies to deliver search results on their intranets and public Web sites.

The company reports the offering is designed to offer better search performance, including increased capacity for more than 300 queries per minute and expanded collections that scale from 150,000 to 15 million or more documents.

The new features, available across the entire product line, says Google, include:

Greater performance--New hardware and software configurations enable administrators to search more documents at a faster rate.

Continuous crawl--The newly developed crawler is designed to scan document collections continuously to ensure fresh intranet and Web site content is made searchable from the Google Search Appliance index. Google adds that this new crawler is designed to minimize system demands by detecting and collecting only documents added or modified since the index update. Administrators can also add pages manually to ensure new information quickly appears in search results.

Improved relevance--The search appliance shares many of the same search technologies developed, tested and refined for Google.com. The new version features Google's latest algorithms and is designed to deliver the same quality of search results that users receive when using Google.com.

Expanded collections--Administrators can now set up and manage as many collections as necessary, each of which can be customized, managed and displayed as an entirely separate search engine.

The three models include the GB-1001, which can now index up to approximately 1.5 million documents; the GB-5005, which provides automatic fail-over designed to ensure high uptime; and the GB-8008, which has been designed for centralized deployments supporting global business units.