The two companies are disputing the contents of a leaked sales document that Google says shows Autonomy making downright fabrications about its enterprise search software.

A Google executive said in a company blog that an Autonomy document, which he refers to as a white paper, would lead a customer or prospect to believe a number of things about Google that are just fundamentally not true.

Autonomy, in a statement sent to Computer Business Review, said the paper in question was outdated and intended for internal use, but went on to reiterate some of the paper’s claims that Google’s enterprise search products have considerable weakness.

The paper itself appears to be a document used by Autonomy’s salespeople and resellers when customer prospects ask about Google Appliance and Google Mini. It was published online by a Korean reseller, without Autonomy’s permission, according to Autonomy.

It claims that the Appliances are simple keyword search engines contained within a black box that lack relevancy, are insecure, and are often unable to index data found in content management systems and databases.

Matthew Glotzbach, product management director for Google Enterprise, refuted five of the document’s claims in a blog posting entitled You can’t believe everything you read.

The paper would lead a customer or prospect to believe a number of things about Google that are just fundamentally not true, he wrote. Inaccuracies about our enterprise ranking algorithms, and downright fabrications about our security and access control capabilities.

Claims that Google Appliance relies on web links to determine relevancy are false and misleading, Glotzbach wrote. Google’s enterprise search algorithms rely on hundreds of factors, only one of which is PageRank, he wrote.

He added that claims that Google cannot tie into other enterprise systems out of the box are wrong, and that perhaps the most egregious statement in the whole document is that Google’s appliances wantonly index documents without regard for security.

Autonomy said that the paper was published internally over a year and a half ago, and that it is constantly revised with new information as products are updated.

In fact, the paper, a copy of which we managed to extract from Google’s web cache after the Korean reseller deleted it, contains a few quotes from a Financial Times article dated June 12 2006, so it appears to be a little more recent than Autonomy claims.

Autonomy also stuck to its guns to a certain extent, in a statement: Many of the areas referenced such as relevancy, security and repository access are still those of [Google’s] considerable weakness.

Despite Google’s brand momentum and its presence in the market for three years, we see it in less than 1% of all deals we do, as large enterprise customers are very educated and know the difference, Autonomy said.

The Autonomy sales document contains a 2006 quote from Gartner analyst Whit Andrews that may back up that claim: Bottom line – Is Google something that should be considered for an enterprise search project. Yes, it should be. Should it always make it to the last round of vendors before the final one is selected? Probably not.