Google has upgraded its Goole Search Appliance (GSA) platform and claimed that the new version can search billions of documents.
GSA 6.0 contains what Google calls a “dynamic scalability feature” which enables companies to connect multiple GSAs across a number of locations. This enables the search platform to cover billions of documents if needed.
“This is the largest scale of search a company will need,” Cyrus Mistry, Google product manager, told CBR. “Google itself has close to a fifth of a billion documents. We are talking really high-end enterprise search.”
GSA 6.0 comes with a number of customisable features, including Ranking Framework. This means a user can tailor results depending on their relevancy, Mistry said. “It is like a star system or a bookmark system,” he said. “The user can dictate which results are most relevant and over time the Ranking Framework will learn the user’s preferences.”
Another new feature is Query Suggestions, which is similar to the Google suggest feature on the firm’s consumer search portal. As a user begins to type a query the search box will suggest query refinements so users type less and navigate quickly. Users can also add any documents to a search result if they wish.
Google claims that the new Administrative API provides more control for automation of common tasks and GSA 6.0 supports early and late binding, so search results can be screened according to company security policies.
“Users should only ever be able to see what they are allowed to see and GSA 6.0 will find everything that a user has access to,” Mistry said. “We have best practices in place so a deployment only ever goes live once certain tests have been performed and passed. We have never had a security issue that wasn’t to do with the company.”
Admins will also have the power to bias the results from selected search appliances up or down depending on their needs or the needs of the organisation, thanks to a new Node Biasing feature installed in GSA 6.0.
To help companies cope with the increased power needed to conduct searches, Google has upgraded the entry-level appliance model to the GB 7007 architecture and announced the release of GB 9009 for customers at the high end – those with installations of 10 million or more pages. It has built-in redundancy and is built on the R710 platform from Dell and powered by Xeon 5500 Series processors from Intel.
