• by Ross Fadner , June 2, 2004

The Google Search Appliance (GSA), a large yellow box with Swiss cheese-like holes that looks not unlike the foam cheese-heads worn by Green Bay Packers fans, is a combined hardware and software solution for online enterprises that require either public-facing or corporate intranet search technology. On Wednesday, Google announced an upgrade to the service.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Google claims that the new model is faster than previous versions, which have sold well in the past, but accounted for less than 5 percent of the company's $962 million in net revenue last year.

The new configurations will allow online administrators to search for more documents at a faster rate, while a redesigned crawler (continuous crawl, which was first deployed on the Google.com search engine) will continuously scan the database contents of either intranet or Web site content to ensure up-to-date indexes. Search relevance will also be improved by deploying many of the same search technologies refined for Google.com.

According to Dave Girouard, general manager of Google's enterprise business, Search Appliance's upgrades benefit from improvements to Google.com. He says the newer version deepens relevance and scalability. "[GSA] essentially implements improvements made to the Google search engine [like continuous crawl] into GSA. In fact, some of the improvements in GSA share the same code as the Google Web site," Girouard says.

A Google spokesperson further remarked that while the continuous crawl feature is not dissimilar to the so-called "Google Dance" that marks the period of 30 days or so needed for Google's crawlers to scan its entire index, updates with GSA continuous crawl are more constant--as even companies with large databases have far smaller indexes than the Google search engine.

"Search inside of companies has been a challenge," notes Girouard. "This was something a lot of companies came to us and asked for," he says. The Search Appliance comes in three main versions, and the number of documents the systems can handle increases with the price. List prices start at $32,000.

Girouard says GSA is for medium- to large-sized corporations with "hundreds, not tens" of employees. He says that several of GSA's customers already deploy GSA both internally and externally, and several GSA customers are also Google AdWords customers.

Whit Andrews, GartnerG2 research director, says that Google had to decide whether it would make sales at a certain level without "a lot of hand-holding."

Andrews says that with GSA, Google is finding a serious market for Web content providers that have more Web pages than they can handle, but don't want to spend a lot of money on a complex, expensive search provider. He notes that from their perspective, the thinking is: "Instead of changing the way we're going to sell this thing, let's sell to a market where the page count is bigger than [any given content provider] thought it would be."

Andrews says that the existing model makes sense for Google particularly because of its low price. "Pricing in the computer industry is agony," he notes, adding that other search vendors like Varity fight Google on improved, more sophisticated relevancy. Scale, he says, is not the hard part. Relevancy is the real issue, but the next issue is cost-efficiency, which is where Google's dependency outweighs relevancy concerns.

Microsoft Corp.'s Longhorn server application could be a potential competitor to Google in the company intranet space, as integrated Web and intranet search is considered one of its most attractive features. According to Andrews, Longhorn is too far away for it to present any problems yet.

"Realistically," he says, "I don't see a strong conflict between the two," as Google's main target with GSA is large corporations, while Microsoft representatives have reported that the Longhorn server will target small- to medium-sized enterprises.

While there is no direct advertising element included in the Google Search Appliance, Girouard notes that Web administrators for public-facing sites can fix the results returned for certain queries through Key Match, a GSA add-on that returns a given URL or set of URLs to the top of a list for certain queries. Through Key Match, administrators can highlight partners, advertisements, and other promotions. GSA is currently used by some 500 clients, including Pfizer, Xerox, Nextel, Procter & Gamble, the U.S. Army, and the City of San Diego.