Introducing the Google Search Appliance, version 7.0

Posted by Matthew Eichner, General Manager, Enterprise Search

Every day, Google helps people find the information they need, when they need it. When you need to know which spices make for a great butternut squash soup, typing just a few words into Google yields the answer in a fraction of a second.

In the workplace, people’s needs and expectations for search are similar. You might be searching for last quarter’s sales goals, product launch materials or your colleague’s telephone number – but there isn’t one simple search box to help you find all the information you need. When 60 percent of corporate workers say that it’s hard to find information within their organization¹, something needs to change.

Ten years ago, Google introduced a bright yellow “Google in a box” for enterprises, giving them one simple way to search all content within their organization. Today we are adding new capabilities for Google Search Appliance customers. GSA 7.0 delivers a universal, powerfully relevant, yet simple and familiar search experience to your users.

Universal search
The GSA 7.0 helps you find information stored anywhere in your organization, whether you’re using a desktop, smartphone or tablet. Administrators can easily add content sources from secure storage, cloud services or the public web and social networking sites. GSA 7.0 also provides Google-quality search for SharePoint 2010, making for a more simple and intuitive, all-in-one search experience.

Powerful simplicity
Users are happy when they get relevant results returned quickly. At Google, speed and relevance are the core components of a great search experience. With GSA 7.0, we’ve refined our relevance signals so that the most useful information for each particular user is always easy to find. Assisted navigation makes it easy to refine search results, and requires no manual configuration from administrators. Entity Recognition automatically identifies and suggests content you might be looking for, and GSA 7.0 also harnesses the “wisdom of crowds,” allowing employees to add their own search results.

More search magic for business
GSA 7.0 also adds a new set of powerful search features, such as:

• Document preview - view thumbnails and flip through full-screen document previews right alongside search results.
• Google Translate - secure and automatic translations display in search results, in more than 60 languages.
• Updated language capabilities - including parsing the complex morphology of Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean to improve results. Expert search - tap into your organization’s knowledge graph, and instantly collaborate with colleagues who have answers.
• New interface - a more beautiful search experience rolling out with the GSA 7 series.
• Improved scale - a single rack of GSAs could now fit the equivalent of the entire Google.com index in 2000 – 1 billion pages.

Search should help your users, not become a source of frustration - especially as the volume of corporate content grows. GSA 7.0 provides a tool that will meet your users’ expectations for relevant and universal search, no matter where they are.
For more information about the Google Search Appliance and to contact our sales team, visit our website.

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1 Findwise, Enterprise Search and Findability Study (2012)^↩