'Google in a box' version 7 improves enterprise search

Today, Google updated its enterprise search product, upping the number of supported languages to 60, better improving Big Data capabilities, increasing scalability and providing document previews with search results.

"Administrators can easily add content sources from secure storage, cloud services or the public web and social networking sites", Matthew Eichner, general manager of Google enterprise search, says. "GSA 7.0 also provides Google-quality search for SharePoint 2010, making for a more simple and intuitive, all-in-one search experience".

Google's enterprise search competitors include Autonomy, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle, among others. New SharePoint capabilities specifically target Microsoft, which stands between Google and any meaningful success in the enterprise.

GSA 7.0 targets Microsoft FAST Search Server for SharePoint, which is available in three editions. Google's timing presumably isn't coincidental, as Microsoft extends SharePoint capabilities to Office 365 and ramps up v2013.

Eichner highlights key GSA 7.0 benefits:

• 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.

Google Search Appliance 7.0 is available now. Like earlier versions, price varies depending on number of documents indexed -- last I checked around $15,000 for a half million of them.