Google offers search engine 'taste test'

Side By Side will work with the Google Search Appliance hardware

Google has released a new tool designed to let enterprises compare their own search systems with Google's offerings.

Side By Side is being offered through the company's Enterprise Labs programme, and will allow administrators to view search engine results stacked up next to each another.

Google said that the new tool will work with the Google Search Appliance hardware and with the web-based Google search engine.

By offering side-by-side search results, the company hopes to lure more enterprise users to both the search appliance and site search offerings.

Additionally, Google said that it will increase the ways in which companies can feed data into the enterprise search appliance. Google plans to offer a new "connector" utility which will allow the appliance to index data from SalesForce.com accounts.

"In the enterprise, search engines crawl more than just the internet; they're also searching across all sorts of data stores and offline content," wrote Google engineers Michael Parker and Salmaan Rashid in a blog post.

"Connectors integrate data from all different kinds of file and content systems, so an employee searching their company intranet can see a single, unified search results page, even if the results are drawn from a wide variety of company data systems."