January 5, 2007; 02:39 AM
Google today announced new features for the Google Search Appliance
that give enterprise customers the ability to customize search results
for their individual corporate environments. The Google Search
Appliance now also offers improved integration with Google services as
well as additional content sources.
New features include:
- Results Hit Clustering are groups of dynamically formed
sub-categories based on the results of each search query. These
clusters appear at the top of search results and help searchers refine
their queries from possible ambiguous terms. For example, if an
employee searches for "customer" on the company network, a set of
categories could appear at the top of the results with groups of topics
such as "customer support" or "customer contacts" to help guide the
search. Administrators can customize the location and appearance of
Results Hit Clustering within search results.
- Source Biasing enables administrators to assign various
weights to search results on their corporate network, based on source
or type of content. For instance, if a company has multiple Documentum
servers, the site administrator can strengthen the content from the one
primary Documentum server. The same is true for types of content. If a
financial services corporation values content in .pdf form more than
content in a word processing document, administrators can use Source
Biasing to increase the weight of .pdfs in the search results. A
menu-driven interface allows weak or strong increases or decreases, and
requires no complex coding or scripting.
The new version of the Google Search Appliance also adds improved
integration with Google Sitemaps export (for simpler export of
information about web pages available for crawling), as well as open
source connectors for indexing content in SharePoint 2003 and
SharePoint 2007.
For more information, see http://www.google.com/enterprise/gsa/.