• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, October 9, 2012

Google updated its search appliance Tuesday, giving enterprise customers more love and attention. Using technology in google.com, the Google Search Appliance (GSA) supports a business's internal infrastructure, crawling, analyzing and indexing corporate data. It has been 10 years since the company introduced the "Google in a box" for enterprises. Now the service offers new capabilities.

Those capabilities in GSA 7.0 range from universal search to document previews to Google Translate.

Some 60% of the respondents to the Enterprise Search and Findability report conducted this year reveal that it is very/moderately difficult to find the right information on a company's network. Only 11% who participated in the study stated that it is fairly easy to search for information, and as few as 3% consider it very easy to find the desired information.

As the company grows, Google will give more attention to the enterprise market. Earlier this month, the company announced Tag Manager to help companies manage the Web page tagging process and improve site speed and performance. As the sole largest technology provider of tags for Web sites, the platform comes at a time when marketers increasingly understand the importance of integrated media and systems. For me, timing has become the most interesting aspect of the offering. Through one interface, Google can sell all its ad technologies.

Most search marketers use Google Analytics, but only about 5% of the top 10,000 Web sites deploy tag management systems, according to an Econsultancy report sponsored by Tealium. Some 73% of the few that do admit that implementing a tag management strategy reduces costs. Executives from other tag management platform providers like TagMan and QuBit see the benefits for search engine marketing.

Graham Cooke, co-founder and CEO of tag management company QuBit and former Google executive, said a mixture of technology and user behavior on Web sites drives conversion rates. Since Google has the ability to understand different tracking technology used on Web sites, the company gains insights to build on other products, such as tools for search engine marketing.

"Google invents a new type of ad technology, and those using their tag management system would have a much easier time implementing it," Cooke said. "It will make companies think about how Web businesses think about structuring their data."

With more than 800 clients on board, OpenTag powers more than $1.5 billion annually in eCommerce transactions and manages tags for more than 500 million page views every month, according to QuBit.