Google Introduces New Enterprise Search Tools

Google is already a player in the enterprise sector but it is still rather small compared to established companies like Microsoft. One aspect where it's doing better than average is, not surprisingly, in the enterprise search market. It's been steadily gaining customers, now at around 25,000, and many of them use its custom hardware offering, the Google Search Appliance (GSA). Now the company is launching two new tools, a Side-by-Side search comparison and new connectors for the GSA.

“People use search to find what they need, and the same holds true in the business world. We want searching your company intranet to be comparable to searching on Google.com, and the Google Search Appliance (GSA) to have the most relevant, high quality results possible,” Michael Parker and Salmaan Rashid, from Google's Engineering team, wrote. “That's why today we're announcing two new tools for Google Enterprise Search: Side-by-Side search comparison and new connectors for the GSA, both in Enterprise Labs.”

The Side-by-Side search tool, now available in the Enterprise Labs, lets administrators test and compare search results using different search engine settings or even different search engines altogether. For example, admins can set up one panel to show results coming from the search engine the company may be using at the time and the other to show results coming from the GSA. Or they might set them up to test different configurations of the GSA.

The users are presented with two adjoining panels, each with a different set of results but with the interface looking identical, so they can't tell where the results are coming from. This should provide admins with real-world data on what results are the most relevant as the users can vote on the ones they found more helpful.

The other announcement today is the new or updated connectors for the GSA. Connectors allow different systems used by enterprises for data management to work together and Google’s solutions allow the GSA to search data across a variety of platforms and sources. All major content management systems are getting updated connectors and there is also a new one launched for Salesforce data.