Nowadays, Google is known for all sorts of hardware. It designs servers and networking gear and other stuff for its massive data centers. It sells smartphones and tablets to the world at large. But before everything else, there was the Google Search Appliance.
A decade ago, when it was known for little more than web search, Google introduced a bright yellow box that let businesses use the company's search technology to find stuff stored on their own internal networks. The Google Search Appliance was the company's first venture into the business world, leading the way for a long list of other enterprise tools, including Gmail and Google Docs and Google Chromebooks.
The GSA -- as Google calls it -- is now overshadowed by so many other Google hardware and software tools. But the company still believes in its mission. On Tuesday, Google unveiled a new version of the tool -- GSA 7.0 -- boasting of a new interface, several new search tools, and the ability to handle much larger amounts of data. According to the company, a single rack of these appliances can now juggle the equivalent of the Google.com search index as it stood in the year 2000 -- i.e. an index spanning one billion webpages.
"Google is really doubling-down on the enterprise search space," says Google general manager Matthew Eichner. "We moving towards the world's largest organizations with the toughest scaling problems -- and this very different from where we focused two or three years ago."
It would appear that the company has significantly redesigned not only the search software at the heart of the system but also the hardware. Three years ago, when Google introduced version six of the GSA, it said the device was based on a standard Dell server. But Eichner now indicates that Google has designed its own machine for the task using commodity parts. "The whole system is tailored to fit with our relevance model, with our algorithms," he says.
On the face it, this creation seems like a good fit for the company. After all, it knows the ins and outs of search quite well. And it knows more about building hardware than you might realize. But in the past, the GSA has never risen above the level of a side business. And though Google is now targeting the world's largest organizations, we'll have to wait and see how readily they respond.
