Google Search Appliance Features

What's New Snapshot - Version 5.0 Features

New Google Search Appliance version 5.0 features give users secure access to more content sources, with enhanced search quality and new user interface options.

Reach

Content Connector Framework The connector framework makes it easy for partners, developers and customers to write connectors to any content system. We have provided pre-build connectors for the following ECM systems: Microsoft SharePoint, IBM FileNet, OpenText LiveLink, and EMC Documentum. Learn more about the Content Connector Framework.

Security

Google SAML Bridge - Windows Integrated Authentication Google SAML Bridge provides support for Windows Integrated Authentication. When enabled, end-users will be not prompted for credential's when they enter search queries through their browser, instead the Google Search Appliance uses the same credentials that the user supplied for Windows domain while logging to their windows machine.

Secure file system crawling and serving The Google Search Appliance provides support for secured crawling and serving of secured file shares.

SAML SPI enhancements The Google Search Appliance provides support for SAML SPI. With this release, we have made significant performance improvements to our SAML SPI framework. As a result, customers who leverage the SAML SPI will see improved performance on their secure search queries.

Search Quality

Date Biasing The new Date Biasing feature allows administrators to influence the search ranking based on the age of the documents. Administrators can also specify the amount of influence Date Biasing should have in an easy-to-use web-based interface.

Google Enterprise Labs Google is continuously innovating with new search technologies that enhance the search experience. Now, owners of a Google Mini or Google Search Appliance can download these new experiments from the Google Enterprise Labs site. These innovative experiments are supported by developer community and are not part of Google Search Appliance or Mini release yet.

Initial labs launch features include:

Search-as-you-Type The new Search-as-you-Type feature allows users to add dynamic, real-time search to your Google Mini or Google Search Appliance user interface. Your search box will dynamically present suggestions and auto-complete queries before the user is even done typing. In fact, we've architected the feature so that you can use Search-as-you-Type on any text input field.

Do-It-Yourself KeyMatches Let your users collaborate and improve your search results. Do-It-Yourself KeyMatch lets your users automatically promote specific web pages for certain search terms. In conventional KeyMatch, users have to ask their Google Search Appliance administrator to add the KeyMatches for them. Now, users can do it themselves in minutes. Administrators can still monitor what's been added and deleted.

Parametric Search Your content already has great meta data? Wouldn't it be nice to give your users access to that information to help refine their search results? The Google Search Appliance support for parametric search makes it easy to using that metadata. Simply plug in this AJAX-based UI component, and see search in a whole new light.

End User Features

The Google Search Appliance offers end users many of the same benefits they have come to expect from Google.com with specific enterprise enhancements that make search easy, useful and intuitive:
• Dynamic Result Clustering
Enable users to drill down on a specific subject and more easily refine their searches with automated grouping of search results by topic.
• Query Expansion in Additional Languages
Increase the number of relevant search results with query stemming and synonyms dictionaries for French, Italian, German and Spanish and Portuguese.
• Google Quality and Ranking
Find the highest quality and most relevant documents; Google factors in more than 100 variables for each query.
• Dynamic Page Summaries
Judge relevance of results more easily with dynamically generated snippets showing your query in the context of the page.
• Results Grouping
Navigate search results easily and clearly using intelligent grouping of documents residing in the same narrow subdirectories.
• Automatic Spellcheck
Avoid missing results through typos or misspellings. Google automatically suggests corrections with startling accuracy, even on company-specific words and phrases.
• Google Toolbar for Enterprise
Put a Google search box in your corporate browser. Installer package enables deployment across your enterprise and custom search buttons enable integration with your Google Search Appliance.
• Google Desktop for Enterprise
Search content on your local hard drive - files, email, IM chats, web pages viewed, etc. Integrates with the Google Search Appliance to provide search results from your computer, the intranet and the Internet in a unified interface.
• Cached Pages
View search results even when the sites are down via cached copies of pages included in the search results.
• Highlighted Query Terms
Quickly find the most relevant section of a document using the highlighted query terms displayed on cached documents.
• View as HTML
Display documents without needing the original client application of the file format thanks to automatic reformatting of over 220 file formats into HTML.
• Sort by Date
Access time-sensitive information first via date sorting.
• Advanced Boolean Search
Perform complex and sophisticated queries with over 10 special query terms, including Boolean AND, OR, and NOT searches.
• Number Range Search
Restrict search results by a number range - makes it easy for users to restrict by price range or any other numerical value.
• Date Range Search
Enables users to restrict search results to a particular date range.

Enterprise Content

• Source Biasing Options
Easily identify your organization's authoritative content sources to enhance the relevance of search results.
• Microsoft Sharepoint Support
Index and search content residing in Microsoft SharePoint 2003 and 2007.
• OneBox for Enterprise [pdf]
Provide users with access to an infinite variety of information sources from inside or outside your company. Google OneBox for Enterprise provides a fast front end into up-to-the-minute information across enterprise applications and services -- including Cisco VOIP system, Cognos, Employease, Oracle Applications, Salesforce.com, SAS and many more.
• External Metadata Indexing
Index external metadata repositories and their associated documents for easy searching across annotated and enhanced content in document and content management systems.
• File Server Crawler
Natively crawl CIFS file servers as simply and easily as crawling web pages.
• Databases [pdf]
Provide access to data stored in your relational databases by crawling the content directly from the database and serving the content in a number of formats including IBM DB2, Microsoft SQLServer, MySQL, Oracle and Sybase.
• 3rd Party Content Feed API [pdf]
Push non-web accessible content – content from portals, content management systems, file shares - into your Google Search Appliance with a simple XML conversion.
• Continuous Crawler
New content is crawled on an ongoing basis, insuring that new content appears in search results fast.
• Web Servers
Provide access to content from all of your web servers regardless of location.
• Proxy Servers
Include externally hosted company content via crawling of proxy servers.
• Lotus Domino
Integrate with Lotus Notes environments using fast, efficient crawling of Lotus Domino servers.
• Meta Tags
Deliver search narrowing and filtering based on meta tag values and display of meta tag values in search results.
• File Types
Search more than 220 file types, including HTML, Microsoft Office, PDF, PostScript, WordPerfect, Lotus and many others.
• Languages
Restrict search results to any of 28 auto-detected languages.

Security and Access Control

The Google Search Appliance provides document and user-level access control across all web-enabled enterprise content to ensure that users only see search results for documents they're permitted to access. Google's access control capabilities integrate with your existing enterprise security systems, and enforce the policy already in place in your content systems and applications.
• Secure Web Content
Enable secure searching of information protected by basic HTTP authentication, NTLM version 1 and 2, as well as Windows Integrated Authentication.
• Enterprise Single Sign-On
Integrate with forms-based single sign-on security systems, including Oblix and Netegrity, to enable seamless searching across secure content.
• Secure Content API
Search across secure content using Google's SAML Authorization SPI to integrate into existing access control systems.
• x509 Client Certificates
Serve secure results to users using mutually authenticated x509 client certificates.
• Lotus Domino Security
Integrate with Lotus Notes environments using fast, efficient crawling of Lotus Domino servers.

Administration and Customization

• Source Biasing Options
Easily identify your organization's authoritative content sources to enhance the relevance of search results.
• Google Analytics Integration
Understand how visitors are using your public website, and improve the effectiveness of your search results.
• Auto-generate a sitemap for Google.com's crawler
Automatically build a sitemap you can submit to Google Webmaster Tools so that Google.com can discover and crawl your public website's content.
• SNMP Monitoring
Monitor system health and appliance crawling and serving statistics via a standard SNMP interface.
• Localized Administration
Administer your Google Search Appliance around the globe in 16 different languages. Full administration is now supported in Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese (Brazilian), Russian, Spanish and Swedish.
• Web-Based Admin Console
Configure multiple logins and administrative roles for crawling, serving, and monitoring with an intuitive, easy-to-use interface.
• Unlimited Collections
Segment the search index to show different results to different users (for example, by domain name, geography, job function, etc.)
• Filters
Easily restrict searches to specific languages, file types, web sites, and/or meta tags.
• Synonyms
Define synonyms for company-specific acronyms or terminology and have those terms displayed as suggested alternative queries.
• Keymatch
Define matches between URLs and keywords with targeted URLs displayed above the main set of search results.
• Look and Feel
Customize search results layout pages using XSLT stylesheets. Provide different branding on different areas of your site.
• Reporting
View and export daily and hourly result sets, top queries, special feature usage and more.
• URL Tracking
View analysis of all crawled content to quickly identify problematic servers, errors and sources of content.
• RAID Support
Provides redundancy from disk drive failures, increasing reliability and uptime.
• Remote Diagnostics
Simplify maintenance through optional remote diagnostics by Google support.
• Google Enterprise Professional