Google unveils Search Appliance 6.0

The GB-9009 GSA can handle installations of 10 million pages or more

Google has today unveiled the next edition of its enterprise focused Google Search Appliance (GSA), which it claims can search and scale billions of documents.

A software update for the appliance will allow organisations to connect multiple GSAs in different locations or departments, and provide all employees with the same search results but indexed to the whole of their organisation's data.

Google has described the update as a new architecture called (GSA)n, which it said will come in two product models: the GB-7007, supporting installations of up to 10 million documents, and the GB-9009, for installations of 10 million pages or more, with unlimited capacity.

"With the improved architecture and software for the search appliance, global businesses can provide secure search across the largest enterprise content repositories with one GSA system that can scale to billions of documents without limits," said Google Enterprise president Dave Girouard.

IT administrators will be able to make search more relevant to business users with added customisable administrative and security options.

A new Node Biasing feature will let administrators bias results from certain search appliances depending on their needs, while an Administrative API will allow them to automate common tasks and integrate the appliance with their existing content management system.

GSA 6.0 supports early binding, so users will only be able to see search results for documents they have access to view but the security check will not delay their access to data.

However, Cyrus Mistry, product manager for the Search Appliance division, said that the most exciting update in GSA 6.0 is the added business user enhancements.

A Query Suggestions feature will function in a similar way to Google Suggest, auto-completing words or sentences as the user types. The only difference between the features is that Query Suggestions will be unique to each particular organisation.

Additionally a new Social Search Feature will allow users to promote specific content for all of an organisation's business users to see when searching for certain terms.