Google Search Appliance Gets Major Cloud-Connected Update

Google may be pushing the Google Apps SaaS productivity suite to businesses of all shapes and sizes, but search remains the company’s bread and butter. Now, those two specialties will finally meet in the enterprise thanks to an update to the Google Search Appliance, featuring a cloud connector that enables search of not only on-premises data but also web services like Google Docs, Google Site Search, or even Twitter. Here’s the scoop.

First, a refresher on the Google Search Appliance for the unfamiliar: it’s a piece of rack-mountable hardware designed to bring the algorithm that made Google a household name to intranet search (enabling search of things like fileshares, content management systems, and application data) or website search (giving customers deeper search options).

But with Cloud Connect for the Google Search Appliance, data from Google Docs and Google Sites appears alongside that other stuff. The Google Enterprise blog entry bills this functionality as a huge boon to enterprises which already own the Google Search Appliance but have migrated to the Google Apps suite.

And it doesn’t stop there — Cloud Connect enables search of “industry websites and blogs” by way of Google Site Search, and of the social network through Twitter search.

Other new features include People Search, which returns people in your organization with profile information relating to your search term – so a search for “field marketing” would return colleagues on the field marketing team, for example. The update also includes Dynamic Navigation, which enables drilling down into results, Active-Active device mirroring which routes search traffic between multiple boxes, and an out-of-the-box ability to search Microsoft Sharepoint 2010 data.

Google Search Appliance 6.8 isn’t exactly incremental — rather, it represents the search titan trying to enhance their value to enterprises in all areas of their business, and Google solution provders stand to benefit. The VAR Guy already keeps Google under his watchful eye, so expect more updates going forward.

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