Google claims its enterprise search appliance are more precise with less work on IT's part.
If you want to implement an IT project that would have employees chanting your name like a superhero, consider rolling out a a really good internal enterprise search engine. Maybe enterprise search doesn’t sound as exciting as all that. But employees report that they spend eight hours a week searching for information, according to a recent IDC report. And they so frequently don’t find what they are looking for that they spend another 2.5 hours recreating documents that already exist. IDC estimates that searching costs your company $14,000 per worker per year and not finding data costs an additional $6 million per year for a company with 1,000 knowledge workers.
Google wants to save you that pain. In June, the company announced the 6.0 version of its enterprise search appliance, which is now capable of indexing billions of documents, the company says. After last week’s announcement in which Google rolled out more connectors for that flagship Google Search Appliance (GSA), I met up with two Google executives in charge of enterprise search, Nitin Mangtani, lead product manager of Google Enterprise Search and Cyrus Mistry, enterprise product manager. We discussed Google’ approach to enterprise search and how it differs from other products out there.
Google has two approaches to enterprise search. One is an appliance. It is available in two sizes, the GSA and the Mini, a less costly appliance intended for small sites and branch offices. The appliance can sit behind the firewall and search a company’s internal documents, or it can sit in front of the firewall and search the company’s pubic documents. The other is Google Site Search, a cloud service which is exclusively used for the latter case. It searches documents outside the firewall, on your Website and serves them up to anyone visiting the site, be it the public or an employee. (Network World uses Google Site Search to index its news stories on our Web servers.)
As you would expect, Google claims its enterprise search appliance is the best on the market saying it is faster, easier to deploy, requires less hardware-infrastructure than a software-based enterprise search product. Another interesting factoid. Just like Google’s public Web search system, the company employs a bunch of PhDs dedicated to creating the enterprise search engine. These folks work in Santa Monica, Calif., not Mountain View. Apparently exiling a group of scientists to a beautiful area surrounded by the beautiful people of Hollywood is a fool-proof method for developing enterprise search (who knew?).
Google also, as you might expect, claims that its appliance returns better results than competitors. It backs up these claims with data collected from the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC), a conference put on by government agencies such as NIST. One of the byproducts of TREC was the development of a set of tools that can help evaluate the effectiveness of various text retrieval technologies. Mistry asserts that The Google Search Appliance scored 25% higher than the nearest competitor in the precision measurement test. The precision test evaluates relevancy.
Mangtani says if he could impress IT professionals with one message it is that you don’t need to waste effort tagging every document. “Do not spend too much time categorizing, meta tagging your documents. A good search engine should do that for you. If you have to tag your every document and create this huge taxonomy, why do you need a search engine?”
As great as the appliance may be (and Network World hasn’t recently tested enterprise search appliances, so I can’t corroborate that claim), there is one area where GSA falls short. The appliance doesn’t support any search AP, I standards, such as the OpenSearch standard. OpenSearch was created by A9 and Amazon as an API intended to let multiple search devices interoperate together as they comb through an enterprise’s documents. Microsoft makes a big deal over its support for the standard. Google’s Mangtani says that GSA doesn’t support it because it is a lightweight standard that doesn’t contribute to search accuracy. Mangtani makes no bones about the fact that Google’s vision is to have the enterprise deploy only its own wares, perhaps even multiple boxes should it need to. That’s a very 1990’s world view. As part of last week’s announcement Google produced a tool, dubbed Side-by-Side, that allows enterprises to compare two search tools against one another.
In fairness Google’s GSA actually does talk to other boxes that store documents. It does so via specially built connectors (another 1990’s concept). GSA ships with connectors to SharePoint, Livelink, FileNet, and Documentum and a connector for Salesforce.com became available last week. In addition, third parties have developed dozens of other connectors to other document stores including BlackBoard, SAP, Cognos, Microsoft Exchange, SAS and others.
Although it would certainly be better for the enterprise if search appliance vendors were willing to support a search standard, ample evidence exists that good search (even if it is somewhat proprietary) is better than badly done search or no search at all.
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