Google Search Appliance Version 7.2 Released
February 19, 2014
By Matt Paulson, TMCnet Contributing Writer
Large Enterprises usually have equally large stores of data. Thus, to sort through the complex labyrinth of company information, organizations often turn to search appliances. For example, Google (News - Alert) offers an enterprise-focused version of its popular search engine that is designed to help enterprises find information within their own network, called the Google Search Appliance (GSA (News - Alert)). Operating as its own rack-based server, GSA aims to make searching internal company records easy.
Recently, the company announced the release of GSA version 7.2. The newest version adds several new features designed to better navigate unstructured content and offers more search features to choose from. The company thus hopes to provide a more flexible search interface, providing an improved admin console, more language support and more wildcard queries.
Wildcard queries allow users to place an asterisk in place of a specific character or string, perhaps because they are unsure of a specific serial number or spelling of a certain word. For example, users that are unsure if the correct spelling is “Sydney” or “Sidney” for the Australian City could simply type in “s*dney” in exchange for results from both queries. This could prove especially useful for finding information on clients with unusually spelled last names or company names.
GSA 7.2 also boasts of an improved framework for indexing information from other data sources. The new version also aims to make it easier for IT staff to integrate the search server with custom connectors, so that GSA can become a universal hub for information. IT staff will also be able to better organize this information with an improved interface that allows them to add metadata to content. GSA is already able to recognize several fields, like author and product type, as of version 7.0, but the newest iteration looks to make searching for documents that lack metadata even easier, so that they may be corrected for future search accessibility.
Edited by Blaise McNamee