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Google Enterprise Search

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30 pointsaburan2837 comments

https://www.google.com/about/company/history/#2002

2002 - "The first Google product for enterprises is released: the Google Search Appliance is a yellow box that businesses can plug into their computer network to enable search capabilities for their own documents."

I've been doing a lot of research on enterprise search products lately and one of the biggest issues is security. Unleashing search on corporate systems where permissions aren't managed really well is a big risk.

That has traditionally been the main objection to the google search appliance, or so I have been told - but the site now says the thing supports ACLs. Anyone has experience with that?

For some of our systems, we use Alfresco and/or Drupal, both which have Apache Solr as an easily-configurable search backend, and which works basically plug-and-play with the respective systems' content permissions.

Using the free versions of all three (Solr + Drupal + Alfresco), search is fast and access-controlled very easily.

I worked for a company that had a Google Search Appliance about 6 years ago, and, like others have said, it basically sat in a rack somewhere and collected dust once we started using some form of integrated search. The GSA was fast and relatively easy to use, but required an expensive initial purchase + ongoing licensing/update fees.

Apart from the fact that this isn't a new product. From a ranking and relevance point of view, can the same (internet) search algorithms be reused for internal (intranet) search? Often permissions, links and usage are not reflective of the importance or reputation of a document like on the public web. Often emails carry a bulk of the decision making material.

Not to downplay the importance of an enterprise search offering, but I don't think Google just packages there standard search in a box nor do I think 1 single GSA box can solve enterprise search.

We had one of these like a decade ago. I think it just sat in the DC collecting dust. Really wanted to look inside but they weld the damn thing shut and you have to ship it back to goog for maintenance.

Same, and I've seen that in several large enterprises since. Typically a case of infrastructure focused IT management saying "Google in _our_ DC, how cool would that be!", getting some boxes, then the inevitable "ok, now what?".

NOTE: Despite that scathing comment, I continue work in large enterprises... sure they have their downsides, but you can also work on really cool things if you seek them out.

They've historically (until this generation -- I haven't poked at our new ones) used commodity Dell servers, along the lines of a 2U PowerEdge. While they were welded shut, it was entirely possible to wipe them and reimage with your own Linux install, provided you had a way to boot from USB. We did this with all of the previous generations of appliances after they were replaced by the new contract. They became perfectly serviceable test boxes.

This has been available for roughly a decade. They work well, and they can certainly produce a lot better results than Google Site Search.

There are a few of these on eBay, I wonder what the pricing model is. Surely Google doesn't like them just popping up, but I guess if you're out of your agreement you can resell them?

I think you can’t use it as a search engine after the license expires, so thus on ebay are just useful as a server you can install something else on.

Please take a look at https://www.mindbreeze.com/. We offer solutions for site search (hosted yet produced for the concrete site and therefore highly customizable) as well as enterprise search. See also some examples https://insite.mindbreeze.com/demotheatre.html.

I really like everything on GSA expect the price tag. I am not much fan of Site Search since I have no control on Meta tag level. I wish they would have kept Google Mini as middle layer between GSA and SiteSearch where I was able to control search in custom <meta> tags. Perhaps also they could have put Mini to Virtual Image or cloud instead of having to buy hardware with it just to make it easier.

It's interesting that this should pop up today. This morning I attended a Google-sponsored event where they spoke a little about GSA.

I'd have assumed that another HN reader was present but I'm in a city with a pretty non-existent tech community and the event only had ~30 attendees, the majority of whom were energy sector CEOs and GIS people.

Has anyone had experience with alternatives to Google Site Search? How did they compare?

We use swiftype. Can't compare with GSS because never actually used GSS, but swiftype seems to have better APIs, responsive support staff and good looking UI out of the box for end users. And we are quite happy with it.

Our company was using the Google Search Appliance for years, but recently switched to Coveo Search.

http://www.coveo.com/en

For an enterprise with mixed Windows and UNIX servers and SharePoint there better options than Google. For web based data, Google does great. For mixed media that has varying security constraints we found Google lacking.

I have set up a website where you can try out several enterprise search engines on the same data. Have a look at http://www.opentestsearch.com/ .

There is also a review of each one.

Very cool service, thanks for sharing.

We used FAST Search.

An interesting anecdote about the Google Search Appliance, a bunch of companies complained about them in the beginning because they conflated "search intranet" with "search file shares" and of course Page Rank is not as effective on file shares as it is on web based systems.

I used to work at FAST, but left soon after they were acquired by Microsoft. How did you use it?

Is this a competitor/replacement for ElasticSearch or SOLR? How is it any different?

It's been there for a long time. It's different because it uses Google technologies and it's not open-source.

It is basically a self hosted scraper and search engine in one. You give it your URL and some display templates and it indexes your site in much the same way Google normally would. The only difference is that the results are stored and served locally. They charge based on documents indexed. I don't think it would be good for storing arbitrary data like Solr, just web pages.

How long has this been available? And what are the prices, would love to learn more.

This was available for years now. This is a server preloaded with google search algorithms if you buy the search appliance.

99k for a three year commitment. Check out GroupByInc.com, too. It's a merchandising layer over the GSA. Very bad ass.

I used a google mini and learned xslt/xml/xsl. It was pretty cool...

Is there a replacement for the mini? We're still using ours, and don't need the full Google Search Appliance.

As far as I know your only options now are the GSA or Google Site Search. The mini is on Google's incredibly long list of discontinued products and services.

Since when Site Search became a paid product?

Why isn't there an AWS EC2 AMI of this?

Because Google Cloud Platform https://cloud.google.com/

That would be awesome, I'd buy it.

Google Search Appliance? Perhaps they should call it NSA Search Appliance. It's even a recursive acronym.

You gotta wonder if it calls home with your data.

You got a firewall so you don't have to wonder.

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