The Google Search Appliance – AKA those spotted, yellow boxes that act as an enterprise search solution – has gotten better. Today, Google unveiled version 6.0, and this new offering is able to scale up and deal with billions of documents.
With this upgrade, Google’s taken a serious technical leap. A post on the Official Google Blog explains, “One billion sheets of paper could circle the earth at the equator well over five times. Counting to one billion would take about 30 years of your life, even if you never stop to sleep. And if you had to find a single piece of information by sorting through a billion documents it would take you, on average, about 2000 years.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE0KNvECG2sWhat’s more, Google’s opened the door to doing business with lots of rather large, complicated organizations. (In fact, NASA itself is deploying the Google Search Appliance.) It’s only these bigger entities that are likely to create over one billion documents, after all, and they’re more likely to need a search solution than a small firm that generates less information.
The Google Search Appliance 6.0 has the potential to become quite popular, then. It might just be nice if Google would move away from the current eye-searing design, or at least offer a less goofy-looking alternative.
