Google search got a real-time upgrade and started to integrate Tweets from Twitter in real-time into search results. So its makes sense for Google’s Search Appliance (GSA) to now include tweets from Twitter next within enterprise’s internal Search Appliance results.
Google offers businesses its GSA product, a yellow box that resembles a slice of Swiss cheese, that can index any enterprise data generated by Oracle databases, SAP systems, Documentum, SharePoint, Salesforce.com, HR systems, intranets, wikis, and more, and presents it to employees in a familiar Google-like interface. Based on a standard Dell server and powered by Xeon 5500 Series processors from Intel, the latest version can index 30 million documents.
Tweets are now considering relevant search information but all the major search engines, and this view extends to the enterprise as well. Social information is important for businesses, Google says, and Twitter offers a platform for a variety of contextual information relevant to a vast amount of topics and data points. The new Twitter function in the GSA can be enabled for many or just a few users and users can choose how they want to see Tweets in their search results. It’s unclear what the financial terms of the integration are.
Google has steadily upgraded its enterprise search offerings with innovations and has seen its client base rise over the past few years. As of a few months ago, Google has 25,000 enterprise search customers, up from last year’s 20,000 customers. Over half of customers use Google’s search appliance and the rest use its hosted site search and other enterprise products. Most recently, Google improved the scalability of the GSA and also added two new tools for Google Enterprise Search: Side-by-Side search comparison and new connectors for the GSA, both available in Google’s Enterprise Labs, which is similar to Gmail Labs.
