April 27, 2004

With its release of the Google Search Appliance last year, the long-time leader of consumer Web search turned its attention to the needs of complex, data-intensive enterprises.

"People buy our product [because] our search results are better," Google Enterprise general manager Dave Girouard told the E-Commerce Times. "For the IT person, their customer is the employee. If it's an e-business, then their client is the visitor to the Web site. We really speak to the benefits of the end user, which is really how Google got started."

The search appliance -- which includes hardware, software and support -- interacts with an organization's datacenter to search either an intranet or a business' external Web site. Companies as diverse as Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Kansas, PBS, USA Today, the U.S. Army and Sun Microsystems already have adopted Google's offering.

Dave Girouard, general manager for Google Enterprise, chatted recently with the E-Commerce Times about the Google Search Appliance, its target market, the vast opportunity within the enterprise search industry, and the environment at the Mountain View, California-based company's headquarters.

E-Commerce Times: How would you describe the Google Search Appliance?

Dave Girouard: At a simple level, it's a Google search engine in a box -- a box that has the entire Google search engine built into it. You install [it] in your datacenter, turn it on and set a couple of configurations. Then it creates a Google search engine within your company for all the information, documents and Web pages throughout your corporate intranet. It's also used broadly on public-facing sites for doing what we refer to as a site search.

ECT: What was the genesis of the Google Search Appliance?

It came about a couple of years ago because we had a lot of customers who said, "We really like using Google on the Web, and, gosh, we wish we had that same capability -- that same kind of Google-quality search results on our intranet -- because we find it's harder to find things on our intranet than it is to find things on the entire Web, which seems kind of silly."

Click here to read the whole interview on the CRM Buyer website.

Source: CRM Buyer

        

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