Google stakes its claim

The enterprise search war appears to be hotting up, as analysts and commentators said it would. Google is making serious moves in this area. Not that it hasn't been focused before - but its new Google Search Appliance could have the incumbents feeling a little concerned.
The latest GSA can now allow organisations to search up to ten million documents with the same box. Previously this figure was just three million and firms wanting to index more documents had to cluster several boxes together. The search giant is also taking its experience in the consumer space and transferring it to the enterprise sphere. So Google Alerts, for example, is available with the new GSA - a handy feature to notify users if a specific document or topic of interest appears. It's actually the perfect example of consumer tech bleeding into the enterprise.
Other useful features include greater personalisation functionality - allowing administrators to bias search results according to user group, so that for example sales documents are more likely to appear at the top of a search if you're in the sales team. And there is advanced biasing technology to enable the weighting of results according to the corresponding document's metadata, such as who the author is.
Basically, Google is beginning to put features in its enterprise search products that are likely to appeal to large organisations in helping to boost worker productivity and ultimately improving the bottom line. While the feature set of the large incumbent search vendors may be more extensive, the ease-of-use and implementation factors must be weighed up, as must the fact that in many implementations not a lot of the products' functionality ends up actually being used.
Interestingly, I spoke to Geoff Brash, co-founder of site search firm SLI Systems recently, who was keen to impress that enterprise search is not just about searching documents behind the firewall. Although to many that's exactly what it involves, there is a wealth of information on the other side of the corporate firewall including knowledge bases and product catalogues that may be relevant to peoples' roles and need indexing.
Tellingly, Brash also admitted that "in the search space the problem hasn't been solved, not by Google or us". In other words I guess, results can still be a bit hit and miss. Google's new features on personalisation and metadata bias are just one way the vendors are slowly getting there, but there is a long way to go yet.