Google revs Enterprise Search Appliance

Google will expand the functionality of its enterprise Search Appliance, allowing corporate users to tweak the results of internal searches by giving added weight to content from specific sources or formats.

A new software update to the Google Search Appliance, launched in 2002, will allow for source biasing,enabling administrators to give search priority to content on certain servers or in document formats such as .pdf.

In addition, the software update will include results hit clusteringfor search results, with the search appliance grouping results into suggested topics. For example, if an employee searches for “customer” on the company network, a set of categories such as “customer support” or “customer contacts” will guide the search. Administrators would be able to customise the clustered results, Google said.

Read the full story (ARNnet)

Ward Cunningham on Google’s JotSpot acquisition

Earlier this week Google announced they had acquired yet another Web 2.0 company, this time JotSpot, for an undisclosed sum. JotSpot’s main product is a wiki, a site for collaboration among many users across a network. Wikis were invented by Ward Cunningham, currently the Director of Committer Community Development at Eclipse. I asked Ward what he thought of thie acquisition and about where wikis were heading.

Read the full story (ZDNet)

Google Custom Search: Build your own Google

What if you could create your own version of Google, and do it almost instantly? Starting today, you can, sort of–thanks to Google Custom Search Engine, a new Google feature that lets you create subsets of the whole Google search engine, then do interesting things with them. In short, it’s a way to carve off chunks of Google and customize them into a specialty search engine with a specific focus. Here, for instance, is a search engine I just built–it took about two minutes–that only returns results from PC World’s blogs, including Today @ PC World, Steve Bass’s Tips and Tweaks, and Digital World. (If you do a search, you’ll end up at a results page at Google–back up to this page to continue reading this post. Or don’t…)

Read the full story (PC World)

The search for meaning

Just don’t call it googling the enterprise. That is the advice to those researching the state of today’s enterprise search capabilities, from Mike Davis, senior analyst at research firm Ovum. According to Davis, US search engine Google does not appreciate its name being turned into that kind of generic verb.

Read the full story (Computer Weekly)

Google profit nearly doubles

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Google Inc. (Nasdaq:GOOG – news) on Thursday said quarterly profit nearly doubled and revenue rose 70 percent, fueled by growth on company-owned Web sites and overseas, as the Internet search leader tightened its grip over the online search market. ADVERTISEMENT Its shares rose 8 percent as the Mountain View, California- based company topped Wall Street’s consensus expectations. That left the stock, which had a lackluster first half of 2006, up 11 percent for the year and in striking distance of a record.

Read the full story (Yahoo News)

Google, BEA in enterprise portal mashup talks

Google and BEA Systems are in talks about partnering on a new initiative that will let organizations create mashups between enterprise portals and applications such as Google Maps. As part of the partnership, BEA will get access to some of Google’s hidden application programming interfaces (APIs), which will allow developers to create mashups using a new technology feature in BEA’s WebLogic Portal, called Adrenaline.

Read the full story (CNET News.com)

Google eyes business market

It already organizes the information on the Web for more people than any other search engine. Now Google Inc. is stepping up its efforts to be the access point of all information inside major businesses and organizations. The company is pouring money into a product called Google Search Appliance, adding sales staff and forming partnerships with information technology consulting firms for the first time. Google is trying to boost sales of a new version of a search engine it introduced several months ago that scours all kinds of information within an organization and presents it in a simple-to-understand manner.

Read the full story (Globe Investor)

Google "Docs and Spreadsheets"

Google just launched Docs & Spreadsheets at docs.google.com. It integrates the previously separate Writely and Spreadsheet product silos into a single control panel and admin area (the previous sites for those products redirect to docs.google). This is not a deep product integration, but it is another shot across the bow of Microsoft Office. I had an unexpected opportunity to meet the team and take a look at the product earlier today along with a few other bloggers.

Read the full story (TechCrunch)

Hyperion and Google onebox in the Enterprise

Hyperion recently announced support for Google OneBox for Enterprise, a feature of the Google Search Appliance. The new solution goes beyond the search integration offered by other Business Intelligence (BI) vendors by providing customers with access not only to BI-related dashboards, reports, metrics and other unstructured corporate content, but also to financial applications-business content such as the business rules, calculations, annotations and forms that enable Business Performance Management (BPM). All this information is now available through a single Google-powered, integrated search window.

Read the full story (CIO Weblog)