Google’s added a slew of new features to its Search Appliance, making it even more attractive to companies.
The new features include clustering (like the refinements in regular Google search), identifying authoritative sources, additional languages, Google Sitemaps generation, enhanced security, and connectors for Microsoft Sharepoint.
The clustering is probably the most interesting feature, and here’s what Information Week writes:
Search results clustering sorts search results into clusters or categories for easier review. The technology is not new and is currently used by a variety of commercial Internet search engines, including Ask.com and Clusty.com. Matt Glotzbach, product manager for Google Enterprise, nonetheless believes Google’s implementation of search clustering brings some new thinking to the table. “We do feel that we continue to provide some technical innovation,” he says, noting that one of the challenges of this sort of technology is to avoid burdening administrators with the need to manually define categories or clusters. “We think it will be very well received by users.”
It probably will be for companies, where information often falls into a fairly well-defined set of categories. Glotzbach, however, said it was unclear whether clustering technology might be headed for Google.com. “Users have been conditioned on the Internet to enter only a word or two,” he explained, suggesting that unnecessary complexity might spoil the carefully calibrated Google user experience. Still, clustering seems likely to be integrated into the company’s Internet search engine eventually, if only to prevent the competition from crowing. Perhaps it will end up being hidden in the Advanced Search options.
The article also says Google has over 6,000 customers of its enterprise search hardware.
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Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.
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