GSA ondersteund Opensearch en Twitter integratie

Net even een blik geworpen op de Google Enterprise Labs Site. Er blijken twee interessante nieuwe features voor de Google Search Appliance te zijn.

Ondersteuning voor OpenSearch
Het OpenSearch protocol beschrijft een standaard manier om een zoekmachine aan te spreken en om resultaten terug te krijgen. Hierdoor kunnen zoekapplicaties gebruik maken van zoekmachines zonder kennis te hebben van specifieke syntaxen van searchengines en de resultaten daarvan.
Internet Explorer en Firefox maken gebruik van het Opensearch protocol voor de zoekbox in die browsers. Dit maakt het mogelijk om een zoekmachine toe te voegen aan de lijst met searchengine die meestal alleen bestaat uit Google en Bing.
Omdat de Search Appliance binnen organisaties wordt gebruik voor het doorzoekbaar maken van de bedrijfsgegevens is dit nieuws met name voor enterprises belangrijk.
Het is nu mogelijk om je intranet of andere bronnen die met de GSA zijn indexeert, direct vanuit je browser te doorzoeken!

Related Twitter Results
Real-time informatie wordt steeds belangrijker om een zoekopdracht compleet te maken. Stel je voor dat je een zoekopdracht binnen je bedrijf kunt opgeven om alle informatie over een bepaald onderwerp te vinden binnen je intranet, file systemen etc. en daarnaast gelijk kan zien wat er op dit moment speelt rondom dat onderwerp.
De Google Search Appliance heeft nu een uitbreiding om Twitter te doorzoeken op het voorkomen van tweets op basis van de zoekvraag die je ingeeft.
Je krijgt zo resultaten van de info binnen je bedrijf, maar ook de info die op dit moment op Twitter beschikbaar is!

Google GSA gets smart (and smarter automatically)

Google announced some updates for the generation 6 of the GSA. They added a functionality that boosts relevance for documents / terms automatically when the link is clicked in the search results.

From InformationWeek:

Chief among the additions is a new algorithm
called Self-Learning Scorer, which analyzes employee clicks and behavior to
improve the relevance of search results.
If, for example, most employees searching for a given term click on the third search result, the GSA will place that term higher on the search results page for future searches.
On the Internet, Google gets highly relevant search results in part because of its
PageRank algorithm, which analyzes Web links and treats them as votes for
relevance. On corporate intranets, a rich link structure is absent, which makes search relevance harder.
The Self-Learning Scorer system should help compensate for the absence of Web links inside corporate firewalls.
[...]
"In other words, the GSA is moving upstream, while keeping the price low, and continuing to disrupt the confused search market," says Feldman in the report.

Google makes good use of "User Generated Content", in this case the fact that a clicked result is the "proof" of the document being relevant for that particular search.

It is good to see that the difference between internet search and enterprise search is becoming clearer.

Google announces the 6.0 version of the GSA, Search experts are not impressed

Today Google announced the release of the 6.0 version of their Search Appliance
The main improvements are

• better scalability
  The Box can now hold up to 30 million documents and can be connected to more appliances to hold billions of documents
  
• Flexible architecture
  It is easier to connect more appliances
• Social Search capabilities
  Add page to result.
  

Some excerpts from other sources:

http://www.itworld.com/software/68712/google-search-appliance-now-can-index-billions-documents

In addition, GSA 6.0 provides end users with social search capabilities, such as the ability for them to add results.

"Google has matured in its thinking about how enterprises implement search," said Rebecca Wettemann, an analyst with Nucleus Research.

Enhancing the Search Appliance in areas like scale, customization and integration will resonate positively in the enterprise market, where Google's main challenge is being perceived primarily as a consumer-focused company, Wettemann said.

While the Search Appliance's functionality isn't still as sophisticated as that of high-end products from Autonomy and Microsoft's Fast Search, it has moved upstream with this latest round of enhancements, said IDC analyst Susan Feldman.

http://www.forbes.com/2009/06/02/google-enterprise-search-technology-cio-network-google.html

Forrester Research analyst Matthew Brown says the product improvements may be as dramatic as Google says they are. But taken in context, Google is still trying to play catch-up to a slew of start-ups and giants like Oracle, he says.

"I'm just kind of unimpressed with what they're announcing," says Brown. "They're coming to market so late, with requirements that were established years and years ago."