20 April 2006 in Google | Comments enabled

Just some general Google news for today

Google have released their newest search appliance – Onebox. Onebox pulls data from multiple repositories into one place where previously the Search Appliance could search file systems and web sites but didn’t help achieve Google’s mission of “organising all the worlds information”.

Onebox is the product of working with third party vendors to provide a much more complete view of enterprise data. This includes now searching over Cisco Meeting Place Express, Cognos (BI tools), Employease (HR tools), NetSuite (more BI tools), Oracle (HR, ERP, CRM and SCM applications), Salesforce.com (CRM) and SAS (yet more BI tools).

Bringing this data out of proprietary repositories can only be a good thing for the end users and Google have started opening up the API for the Search Appliance (if this would make it easy to pull data from it or provide data to it I’m not sure at the moment). Hopefully more vendors provide interfaces for the Onebox to utilise (Aftermail? )

Of course we’re still waiting for Google to make any of their search appliances available in New Zealand (come on! It’s been years since they debuted!). I’d also like to hear how well the appliance integrates the results and ranks them. Hopefully they’re all in one nice structured list that is relevant but that’s considerably easier to say than actually do.

Update: After some more reading it appears that they simply integrate links (Like “Web”, “Images”, “Groups” etc) into the Google Search so that they include the other repositories. They don’t look to integrate the results.

Press release: Google adds secure search across popular business applications.
Google blog link: Google launches exciting new search appliance.

- JD