Google Search Appliance 6.0 Offers New Scalable Architecture

By Geoff Spick (@Goffee71) Jun 8, 2009

Google (news, site) released Google Search Appliance 6.0, offering brand new architecture that promises improved scalability, customization and search results quality.

Embracing The Enterprise Search Market

As if dominating web search isn't enough, Google continues to add new features to its rack-mount search boxes to take on the enterprise search market. However, you have to look carefully to find out what exactly is a new feature and what is labeled with Google's near-ubiquitous "beta" tag.

There are two new products:

GB-7007 licensed up to 10 million documents
GB-9009, which can search up to 30 million.

Each device can be linked to other units in a scheme called Google Scalable Architecture (GSA) to ramp up the search capacity to billions of documents, if your company has that need. The units can be distributed departmentally or globally, but will still integrate.

Both units have built-in redundancy and are faster than their predecessors. Whether it is for corporate web sites or intranets, both devices allow visitors or users the power to search across sites, portals, file shares, CMS and business applications. The need for all this power is to keep fending off its competitors in the form of Microsoft with its Bing, Endeca and others.

GSA 6.0 New Features

Among the new features is the ability to search social sites including results added by users, something helpful in marketing. Translation of queries, not just results, into multiple languages should help global organizations. Additional security is provided with support for Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) authentication and authorization.

In the feature list, you will see a lot of beta tags, so beware of exactly how much reliability and functionality these features provide:

Some of GSA's features are only in beta

Pricing is based on the number of documents searched, although there are discounts for those in the education and non-profit sectors. Get in touch with Google to find out more details.