Google’s Search Appliance can now be used to search documents stored on Salesforce.com, the company said on Wednesday on its enterprise blog.
The integration is made possible using a so-called connector, which lets Google’s enterprise search appliance connect to content management systems and other repositories, including SharePoint, Documentum and now the online CRM (customer relationship management) platform Salesforce.com.
A user searching the company intranet will see a unified search results page, even if the results are drawn from a variety of company data systems both on-premise and from Web applications, according to Google.
Google has also improved the connector for Microsoft’s SharePoint platform with support for multiple-site collection and 64-bit Windows OSes. It has also simplified configuration, the blog post said.
In June Google launched version 6.0 of the Google Search Appliance. It is available in two basic models: the GB-7007, designed for searching between 500,000 and 10 million documents, and the GB-9009, which is capable of searching 30 million documents, according to Google.
Google has also introduced another new enterprise search feature called Side-by-Side, a free tool that lets administrators compare results from Google Search Appliance and Google Site Search with those of other search engines. It can also present comparisons of two different search configurations of the Google Search Appliance.
Users see two panes with different results on their screen and can then vote for the ones they think are most relevant, according to Cyrus Mistry, product manager at Google Enterprise.
