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Google appliance now searching by the billion

Google Search Appliance 6.0 can now retrieve billions of documents within a corporate customer's network, leaving no spreadsheet behind.

Tom Krazit Former Staff writer, CNET News
Tom Krazit writes about the ever-expanding world of Google, as the most prominent company on the Internet defends its search juggernaut while expanding into nearly anything it thinks possible. He has previously written about Apple, the traditional PC industry, and chip companies. E-mail Tom.
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Tom Krazit
Google's latest internal corporate search tool, the Google Search Appliance 6.0. Google

Google sells hardware, too, and announced Tuesday that its Google Search Appliance can now find documents by the billions.

Google Search Appliance 6.0 (GSA) is the company's product for helping enterprises locate and manage the reams of internal corporate data that doesn't get indexed by Google's search bots, but which needs to be found by managers and employees. The latest version is all about scaling, or the ability to link dozens of these appliances to allow even the biggest companies to search their networks for presentations, spreadsheets, and other documents.

There are two hardware models that are capable of searching different numbers of documents: the high-end GB-9009 can search 30 million documents by itself and reach into the billions if a company links several appliances together. The appliances are built on the Dell's PowerEdge R710 design.

Google charges businesses a licensing fee for several years of internal document searching, based on the number of documents inside their organization.