New! Google Search Appliance 6.0

Google announced on Tuesday the availability of version 6 of its Google Search Appliance.  Here are some of the exciting new features in the new version.

Hardware

Google Search Appliance 6.0 (GSA 6.0)’s hardware will be consolidated down to just two models: GB-7007 and GB-9009.  The GB-7007 now supports all license points from 500,000 to 10 million documents.   The new GB-9009 can index 15 million to 30 million documents.  Both models are 2U rack servers, while GB-9009 also comes with a 3U attached storage unit.   

Enterprise customers can mix and match GB-7007 and GB-9009 devices as the number of documents increase.  The devices can be linked even if they're not in the same physical location.

Unparalleled Scalability

The Google Search Appliance 6.0 brings unparalleled scale to organizations, delivering the ability to search billions of documents across all of your enterprise content. With a scalable new architecture, (GSA)ⁿ , multiple GSAs within one organization can integrate search indices across vast ranges of content and provide a unified set of results. This architecture has three main benefits.  

Billions of Documents - It provides the ability for large organizations to search not just millions but billions of documents.  

Dynamic Scalability - The new (GSA)ⁿ architecture allows enterprises to dynamically add scale to their existing enterprise search deployments without disrupting the current deployment. 
 

GSA-to-GSA Unification - The architecture enables organizations to conduct unified search across multiple GSA instances, where multiple departments or geographies might have their own GSA. 

Fine tune relevancy

GSA 6.0 also includes Ranking Framework, Node Biasing, and Collection Biasing, features that allow administrators to make certain documents more or less relevant based on a variety of criteria.  

Ranking Framework – The Ranking Framework enables administrators to feed a list of URLs with weighted scores into the GSA, further improving results.  This input by file approach enables you to input batch customizations for just a few to millions of URLs.  

Node Biasing - With dynamic scalability and integration of multiple appliances across departments or geographies, administrators can bias the results from selected search appliances up or down depending on their needs.  For example, the search results from the corporate GSA can be weighted higher than the results from GSA located in a satellite office.  

Collection Biasing - Administrators can bias specific collections as needed, raising or lowering relevance based on user needs.  As an example, a bank can give a higher score to documents in the Finance collection, and give a lower score to documents in Tech Support collection.

Improved User Experience

GSA 6.0 includes social features like Query Suggestions and User-Added Results to improve the search experience. 

Query Suggestions - Similar to Google Suggest, the search box will suggest query refinements as users enter keywords in the search field, so users type less and navigate quickly. 
 

Social Search Features - With User-Added Results, users across the organization can promote certain web pages for any given query.

Security and Access Control

Support for early binding - The GSA 6.0 also has added a new hybrid security model that allows administrators to choose between the greater speed of "early binding" -- omitting documents from being indexed as per policy -- and the greater security of "late binding" -- constructing a complete index and denying access after the fact as the most current policy dictates.  

SAML Batch Processing - The GSA 6.0 allows customers and partners to customize security authentication and authorization using SAML and now SAML requests will be batch processed for more efficient authorization. 
 

In summary, Google Search Appliance 6.0 provides fast, relevant search for your website or intranet. An on-premise, easy-to-deploy solution, the GSA provides your organization with new heights of scalability, customization, and search quality.