Getting connected Side-by-Side with enterprise search

People use search to find what they need, and the same holds true in the business world. We want searching your company intranet to be comparable to searching on Google.com, and the Google Search Appliance (GSA) to have the most relevant, high quality results possible. That's why today we're announcing two new tools for Google Enterprise Search: Side-by-Side search comparison and new connectors for the GSA, both in Enterprise Labs. Enterprise Labs is where you can find the latest-and-greatest tips and tools for better enterprise searching — tools like Side-by-Side.

Side-by-Side lets employees test and rate results from two different search queries on the same body of data, to see which gives better results. In the example below, the admin has set up two different GSA configurations to search [google].


Employees can then vote on their preferred results, by choosing the Policy A or B buttons, and the administrator can then use that information to choose and set up the right search solution for the business. Product manager (and Enterprise Labs guru) Cyrus Mistry explains more:



In the enterprise, search engines crawl more than just the Internet — they're also searching across all sorts of data stores and offline content. Today we're also announcing GSA connector updates to the major content management systems, as well as a cool new GSA connector for Salesforce data, so the GSA can search and provide employees access to the internal Salesforce info they need in search results. Connectors integrate data from all different kinds of file and content systems (like SharePoint, FileNet, Documentum) so an employee searching their company intranet can see a single, unified search results page, even if the results are drawn from a wide variety of company data systems.

Enterprise search is about the fundamentals: organizing information so that people can do their jobs more easily. You can read more about today's launches on the Google Enterprise Blog, and download Side-by-Side and other search tools in Google Enterprise Labs.

Posted by Michael Parker and Salmaan Rashid, Engineering team