Google reaches further into the enterprise

Google has upped the ante in the enterprise search wars with the launch of a new search appliance, capable of scaling to up to 10 million documents in a single box.

With its increased indexing capacity the new Google Search Appliance (GSA) could extend the vendor's reach into larger organisations. Previously a GSA could only index three million documents and needed to be deployed in clusters to scale this high.

It also contains a raft of new features including greater personalisation capabilities which allow administrators to weight results according to user group, making them more relevant.

There is a new advanced biasing feature which allows administrators to bias results according to type of metadata, and users are now also able to receive Google Alerts for topics and documents of interest, just as they can with a web search.

"We have always focused on making things simple for users and IT," said Robert Whiteside, Google's head of enterprise in the UK.

"This provides us with the opportunity to take the complexity away for [enterprises]."

Whiteside added that the new advanced reporting functionality provides information for administrators on search behaviour, which can be used to tweak the settings and improve relevancy for users.

The new product also features enhanced security, with native support for Kerberos, providing single authentication for Windows, SharePoint and non Windows-based content systems.