LONDON – October 20, 2004 – Google Inc. today announced the availability of its Google Search Appliance in the U.K and across Europe. The Google Search Appliance is an integrated hardware and software search solution that enables corporations, universities and government agencies to deliver Google-quality search results on their intranets and public websites. This new product enables both customers and employees to find the products and information they need easily and efficiently.
“The Google Search Appliance provides fast, relevant search results for companies’ intranets and websites in up to 28 languages,” said Dave Girouard, general manager of Google’s enterprise business. “European companies can now easily deploy the Google Search Appliance to providethe same reliable search results on their intranets and websites as they expect from Google web search, while minimising the time and management effort required.”
First introduced in 2002, the Google Search Appliance delivers the same relevance and easy-to-use search experience users are accustomed to when using Google.com. The product is available in three models: the GB-1001, for departments and mid-sized companies; the GB-5005, for dedicated, high-priority search services such as customer-facing websites and company-wide intranet applications; and the GB-8008, for centralised deployments supporting global business units.
Key features of the Google Search Appliance include:
Relevant results: The Google Search Appliance leverages many of the same search algorithms of Google.com. These algorithms are tuned and optimised for the particular needs of the enterprise, resulting in better quality search right out of the box.
Familiar Google search experience: The Google Search Appliance provides employees and customers a search experience with which they are already comfortable. This includes sub-second response times, dynamically generated snippets and cached HTML pages. Users need no special training and therefore will make more frequent use of search.
Language auto-detection: Automatically detects 28 languages, enabling users to segment search results by language.
Ease of deployment and administration: Google customers commonly have the search appliance up and running in an hour or less. Depending on the number of documents to be indexed, quality search results can be available in just a few hours. The Google Search Appliance needs very little in the way of ongoing maintenance, resulting in a low total cost of ownership.
Continuous crawl: A newly developed, sophisticated crawler scans document collections continuously, resulting in fresh, relevant search results. This crawler is designed to minimise system demands by detecting and collecting only documents added or modified since the last index update.
Enterprise security: The Google Search Appliance can restrict search results so that only those employees with access to a particular document will see it. By leveraging a variety of standard security protocols such as HTML forms-based authentication, Google ensures that search results will be displayed only for which the user has been authenticated.
The following European and worldwide organisations are already using the Google Search Appliance for their businesses and seeing results:
Morgan Stanley
“Morgan Stanley has been using the Google Search Appliance for over a year to provide intranet search for more than 25 thousand employees around the world, searching an index of 2.2 million documents from two hundred different intranet web services. Since its introduction, search traffic has increased by a factor of 11 – proof of how incredibly valuable employees have found improved access to the corporate information that Google provides. Google’s expansion into the European market will help global organizations like Morgan Stanley deliver a high quality search experience to employees and customers around the world.”
Benjamin Fried, Managing Director, Morgan Stanley.
www.morganstanley.com
The British Library
“Millions of people visit the British Library’s website every year to explore the wealth of material from the Library’s collection, including thousands of images and sound recordings as well as our digitised ‘Treasures in Full’. After evaluating multiple solutions we chose the Google Search Appliance which not only fulfilled all our requirements but was, by far, the least expensive option. From the extremely positive response our pilot received we foresee this new search engine will make our users’ experience even better.”
Nicola Clegg, British Library
www.bl.uk
The United Nations
“What we liked about the Google Search Appliance was the fact that installation was fully automated and it is ready to use out of the box. Once you plug it into your network it is up and crawling in less than an hour.”
Najah Didi, The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (Switzerland)
www.un.org
Other European organisations that have selected the Google Search Appliance include Queens University Belfast, Vebra, ContactMusic.com, Euromoney Institutional Investor, the National Health Service (NHS) and the Commonwealth Secretariat.
Google Search Appliance pricing starts at approximately £19,000, including two years of support and software updates. For more information: www.google.co.uk/appliance.
Google is a global technology leader focused on improving the way people connect with information. Google’s innovations in web search and advertising have made its website a top Internet destination and its brand one of the most recognized in the world. Google maintains the world’s largest online index of websites and other content, and Google makes this information freely available to anyone with an Internet connection. Google’s automated search technology helps people obtain nearly instant access to relevant information from it vast online index. For more information, visit www.google.co.uk.
Labels: English (UK), UK news announcements
