Congrats Google Enterprise Lab Graduates - the class of version 6.0

Official Google Enterprise Blog: Introducing Google Search Appliance 6.0: The Story Behind (GSA)n



Much of the Google Search Appliance version 6.0 press attention has been about scaling the GSA to index billions of documents. While that is impressive and creates a lot of buzz, most Google Search Appliance customers we talk to are indexing hundreds of thousands to a handful of million of documents, often at a department level sprinkled through out the organization. The ability for GSAs to talk to each other thanks to federation, something Adhere has championed for a while, and the promotion of other Google Enterprise Lab projects to v.6.0 is the bigger story.

Embedded Google Search Appliance federation, once a Google Enterprise Labs project (and before that an expensive standalone product from third party vendors), allows an organization to roll their tactical search services up to create an enterprise search solutions. This is huge since many of the 25,000 Google Search Appliance are indeed tactical applications.

Other Google Enterprise Lab functionality that matriculated to version 6.0 include Search-As-You-Type, now known as Google Suggests, and a social search feature called User Added Results, which was known as "User Defined Keymatch". These new features were added to improve the quality of search results. Google Suggest is an active component of google.com and that impressively recommends content specific search terms to users after only a few key strokes based. User added results allows enterprises to leverage the wisdom of crowds by empowering individuals to tag search results, map their own best bets and allow other users to vote on the quality of the user added result.

With these new features Google continues to tighten the gap between their consumer web service and their enterprise search appliance.

To learn how to leverage these new features and how version 6.0 impacts your Google Appliance license and set up contact us at info@adheresolutions.com.

Introducing the OBX by Perfect Search

We are happy to announce our partnership with Perfect Search to fill a much needed void for our customers. Perfect Search, an exciting new database indexing appliance startup, has created a version specifically for the Google Search Appliance. This will allow Google Search Appliance customers to index their databases with Perfect Search while showing the results through the Google Search Appliance One Box Module.

This fills a major void that we have been hearing from current and prospective customers in terms of fulfilling all of their search requirements. By maintaining an appliance based solution, the cost of this solution is markedly lower than competing enterprise search software solutions.

We are excited about our new partnership with PerfectSearch, and we also recommend that you check out your web site at http://www.perfectsearch.com for any database indexing needs that you may have (with or without Google, but of course, we could ask, why are you not using Google?).

Thank you, 

Erik

PERFECT SEARCH AND ADHERE SOLUTIONS PARTNER TO DELIVER THE ONE BOX EXTENDER (OBX) FOR THE GOOGLE SEARCH APPLIANCE 

The Perfect Search One Box Extender (OBX) Allows Users to Search Databases within the Google Search Appliance

New York, NY – May 12, 2009 – Perfect Search Corporation, a leading developer of sophisticated database searching technology, and Adhere Solutions, a leading Google Enterprise Partner, today announced a partnership to deliver Perfect Search’s database indexing solutions through the Google Search Appliance. Called the One Box Extender (OBX), this product will extend the Google Search Appliance to enable organizations to search their database content with blistering query speeds – all delivered seamlessly though the Google Search Appliance’s OneBox interface.

Presently, Google Search Appliance users search their database content by sending the query through the OneBox Connector to retrieve results from different systems. The Perfect Search One Box Extender (OBX) for the Google Search Appliance enables rapid search of Oracle, Microsoft SQL, DB2, MySQL, and any SQL compliant database without placing any additional load on these systems. The OBX integrates within the same Search Engine Results Page for database searches through the Google Search Appliance’s OneBox API.

Features of the One Box Extender include:

·       Integrates the power of database search with the power of Google

·       Can index millions, or even billions of database records

·       Removes load on existing database systems

·       Provides better results than traditional SQL queries

·       Complies with database security policies

“We provide Google Enterprise customers with support throughout installation and configuration as well as applications built exclusively for the Google Search Appliance,” said Erik Arnold, director, Adhere Solutions. “Through the partnership with Perfect Search we will be able to offer Google Search Appliance customers the ability to search indexed databases without a spike in costs.”

“We are thrilled to be able to partner with such an outstanding organization as Adhere Solutions,” states Tim Stay, CEO of Perfect Search Corporation. “They have deep expertise providing robust solutions utilizing Google’s applications for the enterprise.  With their guidance, we have been able to integrate the speed and capacity of the Perfect Search indexing and search engine to the breadth and functionality of the Google Search Appliance.”

About Adhere Solutions

Adhere Solutions is a Google Enterprise Partner providing products and services that help organizations accelerate their adoption of Google technologies and cloud computing. Adhere Solutions' team of consultants help customers leverage Google's Enterprise Search products, Google Maps, and Google Apps to improve access to information, productivity, and collaboration. For more information, contact Adhere Solutions at www.adheresolutions.com or +800.799.0520.

About Perfect Search

Perfect Search Corporation is a software innovation company that specializes in development of search solutions, focusing on speed, scalability, stability, and savings. A total of eight patents have been applied for around the developing technology.  The suite of search products at is available on multiple platforms, from small mobile devices, to single servers, to large server farms. For more information, contact Perfect Search at www.perfectsearchcorp.com or +1.801.437.1100.

Start Your Visualiz-engines

TechCrunch announced Google's expanding use of its Trendalayzer within its Search Results Pages. 

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/28/google-now-charts-unemployment-and-other-public-data-in-search-results/

Below is a screen shot of "population of New York" on Google.

Google launched this service at a time when a another hyped search startup, Wolfram Alpha, was beginning to market its wares. You can view the Wolfram Alpha screenshot here:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/28/after-being-upstaged-by-google-wolfram-alpha-fires-back-with-a-leaked-screenshot/

The implications of the this type of search interface should prove disruptive for enterprise applications. As Google and other search vendors attempt bring visual tools to large publish data sets, users will expect these types of applications. Currently, expensive business intelligence solutions, generally in the hands of a just few managers and executive, offer this type of analysis.

The data visualization tools combined with the the Secure Data Connector shows that Google is on a path towards analyzing data on the SERP (search engine results page) as opposed to just linking to the the results.

Progress...It is exciting!

Kosmix and the Spread of Universal Search

TechCrunch posted a story yesterday about Kosmix (http://www.kosmix.com.com), a "search" company that has experienced significant traffic growth in March. According to their web site,  "Kosmix is a guide to the Web. Kosmix offers you a new way to explore the Web—it's the place to start when you want to browse and discover everything the Web has to offer."

Courtesy of TechCrunch http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/15/universal-search-takes-off-kosmix-posts-419-growth-in-march/

At Adhere, we are a big fan of the Kosmix user interface and think that it definitely one to emulate. The "dashboard" approach offers a great interface to a wide variety of different content / domains and falls in line with Google's vision of Universal Search. A vision that Google leaves to customers (or partners like us) to deliver for themselves.

I think that the rise in Twitter also is a reason for their spike in traffic. Kosmix has a nice Twitter interface for their query terms, and twitter has currently reached a fever pitch. Users are lusting for "real-time" news (as it is getting called), so integrating twitter results is a great way to satiate their demands.

We have been advocating Universal Search, to varying degrees of success, and we see this as yet more proof of what people want to see out of the search engine results pages (SERPs) whether they are on your web site or inside of your firewall.

The amazing thing is that it is not that hard to do. With the explosion of APIs, it is easy to create a universal search interface for your users. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, etc. all have APIs to access information, and Google also has brought that ability inside the firewall with their One Boxes for the Google Search Appliance.

So, the path of offering a nice search experience is clear, whether you use or not, please take it! The world will be a better place! ;-)

Connectors Are Not Just for the GSA

Today Google (finally) announced their Google Secure Data Connector (SDC). I say finally because we have known about it for some time, and we are very excited about it. 

http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2009/04/smore-enterprise-developer-tools-app.html

Why? Well, the reason is that these connectors will help enterprises unleash the power of Google technologies. We have been working with customers for years trying to get them to understand how they can leverage the Google Search Appliance to index all of their internal information. But there is always a sticking point around "connectors." From my experience, it was a matter of TMI (too much information). Other enterprise search companies shield these details from the customer, but with the appliance, the customer has to understand the the dirty details. 

Connecting into other enterprises systems is not trivial work, and even though the Google Search Appliance is a great product, many do want to additional expense of connectors (and our professional services).

Now there is a tremendous bang for the buck with connecting into your enterprise content. The Secure Data Connector (SDC) will enable you to securely send your data (and it doesn't even have to be sensitive data to start) so that you can leverage Google Apps Visualization tools.

In the video below, you can hear the excitement of Mark Woollen, VP of Social CRM. The video shows how you can extract data from Oracle into Google, and immediately have a dashboard of the important information from your company. Some call this Business Intelligence, some call it a search application, some say information access and I just think it is cool.

What makes all this possible? Connectors. Once you get the data into Google, then you have the ability to send to Google securely through the SDC. Luckily, our connector suite that enables the GSA to index enterprise content will also help you send the content to Google.

This integration of your internal data with the Google cloud is going to be big!